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EXCURSIONS 



WORKS OF HENRY D. THOREAU 

Cape Cod 

318 pages y 33 full-page illustrations 

The Maine Woods 

4^3 P a g es i 33 f u ll~P a g e illustrations 

Walden 

440 pageSy 33 full-page illustrations 

A Week on the Concord and Merri- 
mack Rivers 
4Q2 pages , 33 full-page illustrations 

Introductions and photographic 
illustrations by Clifton Johnson 

Eachy cloth , 8<vo. By -mail, $2.20 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY 
New York 



EXCURSIONS 



BY 



HENRY D. THOREAU 
it 

Author of " A Week on the Concord and Merrimack 

Rivers," " Walden," " The Maine Woods," 

"Cape Cod," etc. 



illustrated by 



CLIFTON JOHNSON 




NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL COxMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 






f 



3 



Copyright, 1913 
By Thomas Y. Crowell Company. 

Published, September, 1913. 



/ 






CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Biographical Sketch 1 

Natural History of Massachusetts ....... 35 

A Walk to Wachusett 70 

The Landlord Q8 

A Winter Walk 104 

The Succession of Forest Trees 129 

Walking 154 

Autumnal Tints .......... 205 

Wild Apples 253 

Night and Moonlight 292 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



\f 



Concord Elms Frontispiece 

OPPOSITE PAGE 

On the Virginia Road near Thoreau's Birthplace 2 

Thoreau's Cove, Walden Pond 8 

Concord River, near the Battleground . . .16 

Nine-Acre Corner 26 

Thoreau's Grave SO 

Harvard College Yard, Cambridge 46 

Concord Meadows, with Nawshawtuck Hill in 

Distance . 56 

Acton Woods and Open Country 74 

The Stillwater, in Sterling . . . . . . 8(K 

Wachusett viewed from Sterling 84 ' 

The Green Meadows of Lancaster 90 '»' 

The Old Wright Tavern, Concord 94 * 

Merriam's Corner . .102 

A Winter Morning 106 

The Edge of the Woods 112 

A Woodsman . . .116 

The Brink of the Snowbound Lake . . . .120 

The Frozen River 126 

In the Woods . 130 

vii 



viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

OPPOSITE PAGE 

The Mouth of the Assabet 138 v 

The Snowy Woodland 144 

On the Old Marlborough Road 166 

Concord 184 

In Concord Village 202 

The Farmer with his Scythe 214 * 

Main Street Maples . 232 * 

Looking across the Woodland Valley .... 244 

Apple-trees, Sterling 254^ 

The Easterbrooks Country . . . . . . . 264 v 

An Old Farmer 276 ^ 

The Wood-chopper's Dinner 280 S 

Moonlight on Lancaster Meadows 296 * 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

BYR. W. EMERSON 

HENRY DAVID THOREAU was the 
last male descendant of a French ances- 
tor who came to this country from the 
Isle of Guernsey. His character exhibited occa- 
sional traits drawn from this blood in singular 
combination with a very strong Saxon genius. 

He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on 
the 12th of July, 1817. He was graduated at 
Harvard College in 1837, but without any lit- 
erary distinction. An iconoclast in literature, 
he seldom thanked colleges for their service to 
him, holding them in small esteem, whilst yet his 
debt to them was important. After leaving the 
University, he joined his brother in teaching a 
private school, which he soon renounced. His 
father was a manufacturer of lead-pencils, and 
Henry applied himself for a time to this craft, 
believing he could make a better pencil than was 
then in use. After completing his experiments, 
he exhibited his work to chemists and artists in 
Boston, and having obtained their certificates to 
its excellence and to its equality with the best 
London manufacture, he returned home con- 



2 EXCURSIONS 

tented. His friends congratulated him that he 
had now opened his way to fortune. But he re- 
plied, that he should never make another pencil. 
"Why should I? I would not do again what I 
have done once." He resumed his endless walks 
and miscellaneous studies, making every day 
some new acquaintance with Nature, though as 
yet never speaking of zoology or botany, since, 
though very studious of natural facts, he was in- 
curious of technical and textual science. 

At this time, a strong, healthy youth, fresh 
from college, whilst all his companions were 
choosing their profession, or eager to begin some 
lucrative employment, it was inevitable that his 
thoughts should be exercised on the same ques- 
tion, and it required rare decision to refuse all 
the accustomed paths, and keep his solitary free- 
dom at the cost of disappointing the natural ex- 
pectations of his family and friends : all the more 
difficult that he had a perfect probity, was exact 
in securing his own independence, and in hold- 
ing every man to the like duty. But Thoreau 
never faltered. He was a born protestant. He 
declined to give up his large ambition of knowl- 
edge and action for any narrow craft or profes- 
sion, aiming at a much more comprehensive call- 
ing, the art of living well. If he slighted and 
defied the opinions of others, it was only that 
he was more intent to reconcile his practice with 
his own belief. Never idle or self-indulgent, he 







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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 3 

preferred, when he wanted money, earning it 
by some piece of manual labor agreeable to him, 
as building a boat or a fence, planting, drafting, 
surveying, or other short work, to any long en- 
gagements. With his hardy habits and few 
wants, his skill in wood-craft, and his powerful 
arithmetic, he was very competent to live in any 
part of the world. It would cost him less time 
to supply his wants than another. He was there- 
fore secure of his leisure. 

A natural skill for mensuration, growing out 
of his mathematical knowledge, and his habit of 
ascertaining the measures and distances of ob- 
jects which interested him, the size of trees, the 
depth and extent of ponds and rivers, the height 
of mountains, and the air-line distance of his 
favorite summits, — this, and his intimate knowl- 
edge of the territory about Concord, made him 
drift into the profession of land-surveyor. It 
had the advantage for him that it led him con- 
tinually into new and secluded grounds, and 
helped his studies of Nature. His accuracy and 
skill in this work were readily appreciated, and 
he found all the employment he wanted. 

He could easily solve the problems of the 
surveyor, but he was daily beset with graver 
questions, which he manfully confronted. He 
interrogated every custom, and wished to settle 
all his practice on an ideal foundation. He was 
a protestant a Voutrance, and few lives contain 



4 EXCURSIONS 

so many renunciations. He was bred to no pro- 
fession; he never married; he lived alone; he 
never went to church ; he never voted ; he refused 
to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he 
drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco ; 
and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor 
gun. He chose, wisely, no doubt, for himself, 
to be the bachelor of thought and Nature. He 
had no talent for wealth, and knew how to be 
poor without the least hint of squalor or inele- 
gance. Perhaps he fell into his way of living 
without forecasting it much, but approved it with 
later wisdom. "I am often reminded," he wrote 
in his journal, "that, if I had bestowed on me 
the wealth of Croesus, my aims must be still the 
same, and my means essentially the same." He 
had no temptations to fight against, — no appe- 
tites, no passions, no taste for elegant trifles. A 
fine house, dress, the manners and talk of highly 
cultivated people were all thrown away on him. • 
He much preferred a good Indian, and consid- 
ered these refinements as impediments to con- 
versation, wishing to meet his companion on the 
simplest terms. He declined invitations to din- 
ner-parties, because there each was in every one's 
way, and he could not meet the individuals to 
any purpose. "They make their pride," he said, 
"in making their dinner cost much; I make my 
pride in making my dinner cost little." When 
asked at table what dish he preferred, he an- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 5 

swered, "The nearest." He did not like the taste 
of wine, and never had a vice in his life. He 
said, — "I have a faint recollection of pleasure 
derived from smoking dried lily-stems, before I 
was a man. I had commonly a supply of these. 
I have never smoked anything more noxious." 

He chose to be rich by making his wants few, 
and supplying them himself. In his travels, he 
used the railroad only to get over so much coun- 
try as was unimportant to the present purpose, 
walking hundreds of miles, avoiding taverns, 
buying a lodging in farmers' and fishermen's 
houses, as cheaper, and more agreeable to him, 
and because there he could better find the men 
and the information he wanted. 

There was somewhat military in his nature 
not to be subdued, always manly and able, but 
rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except 
in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, 
a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little 
sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his 
powers into full exercise. It cost him nothing to 
say No; indeed, he found it much easier than to 
say Yes. It seemed as if his first instinct on 
hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so 
impatient was he of the limitations of our daily 
thought. This habit, of course, is a little chilling 
to the social affections; and though the compan- 
ion would in the end acquit him of any malice 
or untruth, yet it mars conversation. Hence, no 



6 EXCURSIONS 

equal companion stood in affectionate relations 
with one so pure and guileless. "I love Henry," 
said one of his friends, "but I cannot like him; 
and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think 
of taking the arm of an elm-tree." 

Yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really 
fond of sympathy, and threw himself heartily 
and childlike into the company of young people 
whom he loved, and whom he delighted to enter- 
tain, as he only could, with the varied and end- 
less anecdotes of his experiences by field and 
river. And he was always ready to lead a huckle- 
berry party or a search for chestnuts or grapes. 
Talking, one day, of a public discourse, Henry 
remarked, that whatever succeeded with the audi- 
ence was bad. I said, "Who would not like to 
write something which all can read, like 'Robin- 
son Crusoe'? and who does not see with regret 
that his page is not solid with a right materi- 
alistic treatment, which delights everybody?" 
Henry objected, of course, and vaunted the bet- 
ter lectures which reached only a few persons. 
But, at supper, a young girl, understanding that 
he was to lecture at the Lyceum, sharply asked 
him, "whether his lecture would be a nice, in- 
teresting story, such as she wished to hear, or 
whether it was one of those old philosophical 
things that she did not care about." Henry 
turned to her, and bethought himself, and, I 
saw, was trying to believe that he had matter 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 7 

that might fit her and her brother, who were to 
sit up and go to the lecture, if it was a good one 
for them. 

He was a speaker and actor of the truth, — 
born such, — and was ever running into dramatic 
situations from this cause. In any circumstance, 
it interested all bystanders to know what part 
Henry would take, and what he would say; and 
he did not disappoint expectation, but used an 
original judgment on each emergency. In 1845 
he built himself a small framed house on the 
shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two 
years alone, a life of labor and study. This ac- 
tion was quite native and fit for him. No one 
who knew him would tax him with affectation. 
He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought 
than in his action. As soon as he had exhausted 
the advantages of that solitude, he abandoned 
it. In 1847, not approving some uses to which 
the public expenditure was applied, he refused 
to pay his town tax, and was put in jail. A 
friend paid the tax for him, and he was released. 
The like annoyance was threatened the next 
year. But, as his friends paid the tax, notwith- 
standing his protest, I believe he ceased to resist. 
No opposition or ridicule had any weight with 
him. He coldly and fully stated his opinion 
without affecting to believe that it was the opin- 
ion of the company. It was of no consequence, 
if every one present held the opposite opinion. 



8 EXCURSIONS 

On one occasion he went to the University Li- 
brary to procure some books. The librarian 
refused to lend them. Mr. Thoreau repaired to 
the President, who stated to him the rules and 
usages, which permitted the loan of books to 
resident graduates, to clergymen who were 
alumni, and to some others resident within a 
circle of ten miles' radius from the College. Mr. 
Thoreau explained to the President that the rail- 
road had destroyed the old scale of distances, — 
that the library was useless, yes, and President 
and College useless, on the terms of his rules, — 
that the one benefit he owed to the College was 
its library, — that, at this moment, not only his 
want of books was imperative, but he wanted a 
large number of books, and assured him that 
he, Thoreau, and not the librarian, was the 
proper custodian of these. In short, the Presi- 
dent found the petitioner so formidable, and the 
rules getting to look so ridiculous, that he ended 
by giving him a privilege which in his hands 
proved unlimited thereafter. 

No truer American existed than Thoreau. 
His preference of his country and condition was 
genuine, and his aversation from English and 
European manners and tastes almost reached 
contempt. He listened impatiently to news or 
bon mots gleaned from London circles; and 
though he tried to be civil, these anecdotes fa- 
tigued him. The men were all imitating each 




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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 9 

other, and on a small mould. Why can they not 
live as far apart as possible, and each be a man 
by himself? What he sought was the most ener- 
getic nature; and he wished to go to Oregon, 
not to London. "In every part of Great Brit- 
ain," he wrote in his diary, "are discovered 
traces of the Romans, their funereal urns, their 
camps, their roads, their dwellings. But New 
England, at least, is not based on any Roman 
ruins. We have not to lay the foundations of 
our houses on the ashes of a former civilization." 
But, idealist as he was, standing for abolition 
of slavery, abolition of tariffs, almost for aboli- 
tion of government, it is needless to say he found 
himself not only unrepresented in actual politics, 
but almost equally opposed to every class of re- 
formers. Yet he paid the tribute of his uniform 
respect to the Anti- Slavery Party. One man, 
whose personal acquaintance he had formed, he 
honored with exceptional regard. Before the 
first friendly word had been spoken for Captain 
John Brown, after the arrest, he sent notices to 
most houses in Concord, that he would speak in 
a public hall on the condition and character of 
John Brown, on Sunday evening, and invited all 
people to come. The Republican Committee, 
the Abolitionist Committee, sent him word that 
it was premature and not advisable. He re- 
plied, — "I did not send to you for advice, but 
to announce that I am to speak." The hall was 



10 EXCURSIONS 

filled at an early hour by people of all parties, 
and his earnest eulogy of the hero was heard by 
all respectfully, by many with a sympathy that 
surprised themselves. 

It was said of Plotinus that he was ashamed 
of his body, and 'tis very likely he had good 
reason for it, — that his body was a bad servant, 
and he had not skill in dealing with the material 
world, as happens often to men of abstract in- 
tellect. But Mr. Thoreau was equipped with 
a most adapted and serviceable body. He was 
of short stature, firmly built, of light complex- 
ion, with strong, serious blue eyes, and a grave 
aspect, — his face covered in the late years with a 
becoming beard. His senses were acute, his 
frame well-knit and hardy, his hands strong and 
skilful in the use of tools. And there was a won- 
derful fitness of body and mind. He could pace 
sixteen rods more accurately than another man 
could measure them with rod and chain. He 
could find his path in the woods at night, he said, 
better by his feet than his eyes. He could esti- 
mate the measure of a tree very well by his eyes ; 
he could estimate the weight of a calf or a pig, 
like a dealer. From a box containing a bushel 
or more of loose pencils, he could take up with 
his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at 
every grasp. He was a good swimmer, runner, 
skater, boatman, and would probably outwalk 
most countrymen in a day's journey. And the 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 11 

relation of body to mind was still finer than we 
have indicated. He said he wanted every stride 
his legs made. The length of his walk uniformly 
made the length of his writing. If shut up in 
the house, he did not write at all. 

He had a strong common sense, like that 
which Rose Flammock, the weaver's daughter, 
in Scott's romance, commends in her father, as 
resembling a yardstick, which, whilst it measures 
dowlas and diaper, can equally well measure tap- 
estry and cloth of gold. He had always a new 
resource. When I was planting forest-trees, and 
had procured half a peck of acorns, he said that 
only a small portion of them would be sound, 
and proceeded to examine them, and select the 
sound ones. But finding this took time, he said, 
"I think, if you put them all into water, the good 
ones will sink"; which experiment we tried with 
success. He could plan a garden, or a house, or 
a barn; would have been competent to lead a 
"Pacific Exploring Expedition"; could give ju- 
dicious counsel in the gravest private or public 
affairs. 

He lived for the day, not cumbered and morti- 
fied by his memory. If he brought you yester- 
day a new proposition, he would bring you 
to-day another not less revolutionary. A very in- 
dustrious man, and setting, like all highly organ- 
ized men, a high value on his time, he seemed 
the only man of leisure in town, always ready 



12 EXCURSIONS 

for any excursion that promised well, or for 
conversation prolonged into late hours. His 
trenchant sense was never stopped by his rules 
of daily prudence, but was always up to the new 
occasion. He liked and used the simplest food, 
yet, when some one urged a vegetable diet, 
Thoreau thought all diets a very small matter, 
saying that "the man who shoots the buffalo lives 
better than the man who boards at the Graham 
House." He said, — "You can sleep near the 
railroad, and never be disturbed: Nature knows 
very well what sounds are worth attending to, 
and has made up her mind not to hear the rail- 
road-whistle. But things respect the devout 
mind, and a mental ecstasy was never inter- 
rupted." He noted, what repeatedly befell him, 
that, after receiving from a distance a rare plant, 
he would presently find the same in his own 
haunts. And those pieces of luck which happen 
only to good players happened to him. One day, 
walking with a stranger, who inquired where 
Indian arrow-heads could be found, he replied, 
"Everywhere," and, stooping forward, picked 
one on the instant from the ground. At Mount 
Washington, in Tuckerman's Ravine, Thoreau 
had a bad fall, and sprained his foot. As he was 
in the act of getting up from his fall, he saw for 
the first time the leaves of the Arnica mollis. 

His robust common sense, armed with stout 
hands, keen perceptions, and strong will, cannot 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 13 

yet account for the superiority which shone in 
his simple and hidden life. I must add the car- 
dinal fact, that there was an excellent wisdom 
in him, proper to a rare class of men, which 
showed him the material world as a means and 
symbol. This discovery, which sometimes yields 
to poets a certain casual and interrupted light, 
serving for the ornament of their writing, was 
in him an unsleeping insight ; and whatever faults 
or obstructions of temperament might cloud it, 
he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. 
In his youth, he said, one day, "The other world 
is all my art: my pencils will draw no other; 
my jack-knife will cut nothing else; I do not use 
it as a means." This was the muse and genius 
that ruled his opinions, conversation, studies, 
work, and course of life. This made him a 
searching judge of men. At first glance he 
measured his companion, and, though insensible 
to some fine traits of culture, could very well re- 
port his weight and calibre. And this made the 
impression of genius which his conversation often 
gave. 

He understood the matter in hand at a glance, 
and saw the limitations and poverty of those he 
talked with, so that nothing seemed concealed 
from such terrible eyes. I have repeatedly 
known young men of sensibility converted in a 
moment to the belief that this was the man they 
were in search of, the man of men, who could 



14 EXCURSIONS 

tell them all they should do. His own deal- 
ing with them was never affectionate, but supe- 
rior, didactic, — scorning their petty ways,— very 
slowly conceding, or not conceding at all, the 
promise of his society at their houses, or even at 
his own. "Would he not walk with them?" "He 
did not know. There was nothing so important 
to him as his walk; he had no walks to throw 
away on company." Visits were offered him 
from respectful parties, but he declined them. 
Admiring friends offered to carry him at their 
own cost to the Yellow- Stone River, — to the 
West Indies, — to South America. But though 
nothing could be more grave or considered than 
his refusals, they remind one in quite new rela- 
tions of that fop Brummers reply to the gentle- 
man who offered him his carriage in a shower, 
"But where will you ride, then?" — and what ac- 
cusing silences, and what searching and irre- 
sistible speeches, battering down all defences, his 
companions can remember! 

Mr. Thoreau dedicated his genius with such 
entire love to the fields, hills, and waters of his 
native town, that he made them known and in- 
teresting to all reading Americans, and to peo- 
ple over the sea. The river on whose banks he 
was born and died he knew from its springs to 
its confluence with the Merrimack. He had 
made summer and winter observations on it for 
many years, and at every hour of the day and 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 15 

the night. The result of the recent survey of 
the Water Commissioners appointed by the 
State of Massachusetts he had reached by his 
private experiments, several years earlier. Every 
fact which occurs in the bed, on the banks, or 
in the air over it; the fishes, and their spawn- 
ing and nests, their manners, their food; the 
shad-flies which fill the air on a certain evening 
once a year, and which are snapped at by the 
fishes so ravenously that many of these die of 
repletion; the conical heaps of small stones on 
the river- shallows, one of which heaps will some- 
times overfill a cart, — these heaps the huge nests 
of small fishes; the birds which frequent the 
stream, heron, duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey; the 
snake, musk-rat, otter, woodchuck, and fox, on 
the banks; the turtle, frog, hyla, and cricket, 
which make the banks vocal, — were all known to 
him, and, as it were, townsmen and fellow-crea- 
tures; so that he felt an absurdity or violence 
in any narrative of one of these by itself apart, 
and still more of its dimensions on an inch-rule, 
or in the exhibition of its skeleton, or the speci- 
men of a squirrel or a bird in brandy. He 
liked to speak of the manners of the river, as it- 
self a lawful creature, yet with exactness, and 
always to an observed fact. As he knew the 
river, so the ponds in this region. 

One of the weapons he used, more important 
than microscope or alcohol-receiver to other in- 



16 EXCURSIONS 

vestigators, was a whim which grew on him by 
indulgence, yet appeared in gravest statement, 
namely, of extolling his own town and neighbor- 
hood as the most favored centre for natural ob- 
servation. He remarked that the Flora of 
Massachusetts embraced almost all the impor- 
tant plants of America, — most of the oaks, most 
of the willows, the best pines, the ash, the maple, 
the beech, the nuts. He returned Kane's "Arctic 
Voyage" to a friend of whom he had borrowed 
it, with the remark, that "most of the phenom- 
ena noted might be observed in Concord." He 
seemed a little envious of the Pole, for the coin- 
cident sunrise and sunset, of five minutes' day 
after six months: a splendid fact, which An- 
nursnuc had never afforded him. He found red 
snow in one of his walks, and told me that he 
expected to find yet the Victoria regia in Con- 
cord. He was the attorney of the indigenous 
plants, and owned to a preference of the weeds 
to the imported plants, as of the Indian to the 
civilized man, — and noticed, with pleasure, that 
the willow bean-poles of his neighbor had grown 
more than his beans. "See these weeds," he said, 
"which have been hoed at by a million farmers 
all spring and summer, and yet have prevailed, 
and just now come out triumphant over all lanes, 
pastures, fields, and gardens, such is their vigor. 
We have insulted them with low names, too, — as 
Pigweed, Wormwood, Chickweed, Shad-Bios- 





■i% <%- 1 






Concord River, near the battleground 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 17 

som." He says, "They have brave names, too, — 
Ambrosia, Stellaria, Amelanchia, Amaranth, 
etc." 

I think his fancy for referring everything to 
the meridian of Concord did not grow out of any 
ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or 
latitudes, but was rather a playful expression of 
his conviction of the indifferency of all places, 
and that the best place for each is where he 
stands. He expressed it once in this wise: — "I 
think nothing is to be hoped from you, if this 
bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to 
you to eat than any other in this world, or in any 
world." 

The other weapon with which he conquered all 
obstacles in science was patience. He knew how 
to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, 
until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had re- 
tired from him, should come back, and resume 
its habits, nay, moved by curiosity, should come 
to him and watch him. 

It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with 
him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, 
and passed through it as freely by paths of his 
own. He knew every track in the snow or on 
the ground, and what creature had taken this 
path before him. One must submit abjectly to 
such a guide, and the reward was great. Under 
his arm he carried an old music-book to press 
plants ; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy- 



18 EXCURSIONS 

glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and 
twine. He wore straw hat, stout shoes, strong 
gray trousers, to brave shrub-oaks and smilax, 
and to climb a tree for a hawk's or a squirrel's 
nest. He waded into the pool for the water- 
plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant 
part of his armor. On the day I speak of he 
looked for the Menyanthes, detected it across the 
wide pool, and, on examination of the florets, de- 
cided that it had been in flower five days. He 
drew out of his breast-pocket his diary, and read 
the names of all the plants that should bloom on 
this day, whereof he kept account as a banker 
when his notes fall due. The Cypripedium 
not due till to-morrow. He thought, that, if 
waked up from a trance, in this swamp, he could 
tell by the plants what time of the year it was 
within two days. The redstart was flying about, 
and presently the fine grosbeaks, whose brilliant 
scarlet makes the rash gazer wipe his eye, and 
whose fine clear note Thoreau compared to that 
of a tanager which has got rid of its hoarseness. 
Presently he heard a note which he called that 
of the night-warbler, a bird he had never iden- 
tified, had been in search of twelve years, which 
always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving 
down into a tree or bush, and which it was vain 
to seek; the only bird that sings indifferently by 
night and by day. I told him he must beware 
of finding and booking it, lest life should have 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 19 

nothing more to show him. He said, "What you 
seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come 
full upon all the family at dinner. You seek it 
like a dream, and as soon as you find it you be- 
come its prey." 

His interest in the flower or the bird lay very 
deep in his mind, was connected with Nature,— 
and the meaning of Nature was never attempted 
to be defined by him. He would not offer a 
memoir of his observations to the Natural His- 
tory Society. "Why should I? To detach the 
description from its connections in my mind 
would make it no longer true or valuable to me : 
and they do not wish what belongs to it." His 
power of observation seemed to indicate addi- 
tional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard 
as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a pho- 
tographic register of all he saw and heard. And 
yet none knew better than he that it is not the 
fact that imports, but the impression or effect of 
the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory 
in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of 
the whole. 

His determination on Natural History was 
organic. He confessed that he sometimes felt 
like a hound or a panther, and, if born among 
Indians, would have been a fell hunter. But, 
restrained by his Massachusetts culture, he 
played out the game in this mild form of botany 
and ichthyology. His intimacy with animals 



20 EXCURSIONS 

suggested what Thomas Fuller records of Butler 
the apiologist, that "either he had told the bees 
things or the bees had told him." Snakes coiled 
round his leg ; the fishes swam into his hand, and 
he took them out of the water; he pulled the 
woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took 
the foxes under his protection from the hunters. 
Our naturalist had perfect magnanimity ; he had 
no secrets: he would carry you to the heron's 
haunt, or even to his most prized botanical 
swamp, — possibly knowing that you could never 
find it again, yet willing to take his risks. 

No college ever offered him a diploma, or a 
professor's chair; no academy made him its cor- 
responding secretary, its discoverer, or even its 
member. Perhaps these learned bodies feared 
the satire of his presence. Yet so much knowl- 
edge of Nature's secret and genius few others 
possessed, none in a more large and religious syn- 
thesis. For not a particle of respect had he to 
the opinions of any man or body of men, but 
homage solely to the truth itself; and as he dis- 
covered everywhere among doctors some leaning 
of courtesy, it discredited them. He grew to be 
revered and admired by his townsmen, who had 
at first known him only as an oddity. The farm- 
ers who employed him as a surveyor soon dis- 
covered his rare accuracy and skill, his knowledge 
of their lands, of trees, of birds, of Indian re- 
mains, and the like, which enabled him to tell 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 21 

every farmer more than he knew before of his 
own farm; so that he began to feel as if Mr. 
Thoreau had better rights in his land than he. 
They felt, too, the superiority of character which 
addressed all men with a natrve authority. 

Indian relics abound in Concord, — arrow- 
heads, stone chisels, pestles, and fragments of 
pottery; and on the river-bank, large heaps of 
clam-shells and ashes mark spots which the sav- 
ages frequented. These, and every circumstance 
touching the Indian, were important in his eyes. 
His visits to Maine were chiefly for love of the 
Indian. He had the satisfaction of seeing the 
manufacture of the bark-canoe, as well as of 
trying his hand in its management on the rapids. 
He was inquisitive about the making of the stone 
arrow-head, and in his last days charged a youth 
setting out for the Rocky Mountains to find an 
Indian who could tell him that: "It was well 
worth a visit to California to learn it." Occa- 
sionally, a small party of Penobscot Indians 
would visit Concord, and pitch their tents for a 
few weeks in summer on the river-bank. He 
failed not to make acquaintance with the best 
of them; though he well knew that asking ques- 
tions of Indians is like catechizing beavers and 
rabbits. In his last visit to Maine he had great 
satisfaction from Joseph Polis, an intelligent In- 
dian of Oldtown, who was his guide for some 
weeks. 



22 EXCURSIONS 

He was equally interested in every natural 
fact. The depth of his perception found likeness 
of law throughout Nature, and I know not any 
genius who so swiftly inferred universal law 
from the single fact. He was no pedant of a 
department. His eye was open to beauty, and 
his ear to music. He found these, not in rare 
conditions, but wheresoever he went. He thought 
the best of music was in single strains; and he 
found poetic suggestion in the humming of the 
telegraph-wire. 

His poetry might be bad or good ; he no doubt 
wanted a lyric facility and technical skill; but 
he had the source of poetry in his spiritual per- 
ception. He was a good reader and critic, and 
his judgment on poetry was to the ground of it. 
He could not be deceived as to the presence or 
absence of the poetic element in any composi- 
tion, and his thirst for this made him negligent 
and perhaps scornful of superficial graces. He 
would pass by many delicate rhythms, but he 
would have detected every live stanza or line in 
a volume, and knew very well where to find an 
equal poetic charm in prose. He was so enam- 
ored of the spiritual beauty that he held all ac- 
tual written poems in very light esteem in the 
comparison. He admired iEschylus and Pin- 
dar; but, when some one was commending them, 
he said that "iEschylus and the Greeks, in de- 
scribing Apollo and Orpheus, had given no song, 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 23 

or no good one. They ought not to have moved 
trees, but to have chanted to the gods such a 
hymn as would have sung all their old ideas out 
of their heads, and new ones in." His own verses 
are often rude and defective. The gold does 
not yet run pure, is drossy and crude. The 
thyme and marjoram are not yet honey. But 
if he want lvric fineness and technical merits, if 
he have not the poetic temperament, he never 
lacks the causal thought, showing that his genius 
was better than his talent. He knew the worth 
of the Imagination for the uplifting and conso- 
lation of human life, and liked to throw every 
thought into a symbol. The fact you tell is of 
no value, but only the impression. For this rea- 
son his presence was poetic, always piqued the 
curiosity to know more deeply the secrets of his 
mind. He had many reserves, an unwillingness 
to exhibit to profane eyes what was still sacred 
in his own, and knew well how to throw a poetic 
veil over his experience. All readers of "Wal- 
den" will remember his mythical record of his 
disappointments : — 

"I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a 
turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many 
are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, 
describing their tracks, and what calls they an- 
swered to. I have met one or two who had 
heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, 
and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud ; 



24 EXCURSIONS 

and they seemed as anxious to recover them as 
if they had lost them themselves." * 

His riddles were worth the reading, and I con- 
fide, that, if at any time I do not understand the 
expression, it is yet just. Such was the wealth 
of his truth that it was not worth his while to 
use words in vain. His poem entitled "Sym- 
pathy" reveals the tenderness under that triple 
steel of stoicism, and the intellectual subtilty it 
could animate. His classic poem on "Smoke" 
suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem 
of Simonides. His biography is in his verses. 
His habitual thought makes all his poetry a hymn 
to the Cause of causes, the Spirit which vivifies 
and controls his own. 

"I hearing get, who had but ears, 
And sight, who had but eyes before; 
I moments live, who lived but years, 
And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore." 

And still more in these religious lines: — 

"Now chiefly is my natal hour, 
And only now my prime of life; 
I will not doubt the love untold, 
Which not my worth or want hath bought, 
Which wooed me young, and wooes me old, 
And to this evening hath me brought." 

Whilst he used in his writings a certain petu- 
lance of remark in reference to churches or 
churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender, 

^'Walden," p. 20. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 25 

and absolute religion, a person incapable of any 
profanation, by act or by thought. Of course, 
the same isolation which belonged to his orig- 
inal thinking and living detached him from the 
social religious forms. This is neither to be cen- 
sured nor regretted. Aristotle long ago ex- 
plained it, when he said, "One who surpasses his 
fellow-citizens in virtue is no longer a part of 
the city. Their law is not for him, since he is 
a law to himself." 

Thoreau was sincerity itself, and might for- 
tify the convictions of prophets in the ethical 
laws by his holy living. It was an affirmative 
experience which refused to be set aside. A 
truth-speaker he, capable of the most deep and 
strict conversation; a physician to the wounds 
of any soul; a friend, knowing not only the se- 
cret of friendship, but almost worshipped by 
those few persons who resorted to him as their 
confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value 
of his mind and great heart. He thought that 
without religion or devotion of some kind noth- 
ing great was ever accomplished : and he thought 
that the bigoted sectarian had better bear this in 
mind. 

His virtues, of course, sometimes ran into ex- 
tremes. It was easy to trace to the inexorable 
demand on all for exact truth that austerity 
which made this willing hermit more solitary 
even than he wished. Himself of a perfect prob- 



26 EXCURSIONS 

ity, he required not less of others. He had a 
disgust at crime, and no worldly success could 
cover it. He detected paltering as readily in 
dignified and prosperous persons as in beggars, 
and with equal scorn. Such dangerous frank- 
ness was in his dealing that his admirers called 
him "that terrible Thoreau," as if he spoke when 
silent, and was still present when he had de- 
parted. I think the severity of his ideal inter- 
fered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of 
human societv. 

The habit of a realist to find things the re- 
verse of their appearance inclined him to put 
every statement in a paradox. A certain habit 
of antagonism defaced his earlier writings, — a 
trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, 
of substituting for the obvious w T ord and thought 
its diametrical opposite. He praised wild moun- 
tains and winter forests for their domestic air, 
in snow and ice he would find sultriness, and 
commended the wilderness for resembling Rome 
and Paris. "It was so dry, that you might call 
it wet." 

The tendency to magnify the moment, to read 
all the laws of Nature in the one object or one 
combination under your eye, is of course comic 
to those who do not share the philosopher's per- 
ception of identity. To him there was no such 
thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the 
Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred 




v. 






BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 27 

every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though he 
meant to be just, he seemed haunted by a cer- 
tain chronic assumption that the science of the 
day pretended completeness, and he had just 
found out that the savans had neglected to dis- 
criminate a particular botanical variety, had 
failed to describe the seeds or count the sepals. 
"That is to say," we replied, "the blockheads 
were not born in Concord; but who said they 
were? It was their unspeakable misfortune to 
be born in London, or Paris, or Rome ; but, poor 
fellows, they did what they could, considering 
that they never saw Bateman's Pond, or Nine- 
Acre Corner, or Becky- Stow's Swamp. Besides, 
what were you sent into the world for, but to 
add this observation?" 

Had his genius been only contemplative, he 
had been fitted to his life, but with his energy 
and practical ability he seemed born for great 
enterprise and for command; and I so much re- 
gret the loss of his rare powers of action, that 
I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he 
had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of en- 
gineering for all America, he was the captain 
of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good 
to the end of pounding empires one of these 
days; but if at the end of years, it is still only 
beans ! 

But these foibles, real or apparent, were fast 
vanishing in the incessant growth of a spirit so 



28 EXCURSIONS 

robust and wise, and which effaced its defeats 
with new triumphs. His study of Nature was 
a perpetual ornament to him, and inspired his 
friends with curiosity to see the world through 
his eyes, and to hear his adventures. They pos- 
sessed every kind of interest. 

He had many elegances of his own, whilst he 
scoffed at conventional elegance. Thus, he could 
not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, the 
grit of gravel; and therefore never willingly 
walked in the road, but in the grass, on moun- 
tains and in woods. His senses were acute, and 
he remarked that by night every dwelling-house 
gives out bad air, like a slaughter-house. He 
liked the pure fragrance of melilot. He hon- 
ored certain plants with special regard, and, over 
all, the pond-lily, — then, the gentian, and the 
Mikania scandens, and "life-everlasting," and a 
bass-tree which he visited every year when it 
bloomed, in the middle of July. He thought 
the scent a more oracular inquisition than the 
sight, — more oracular and trustworthy. The 
scent, of course, reveals what is concealed from 
the other senses. By it he detected earthiness. 
He delighted in echoes, and said they were al- 
most the only kind of kindred voices that he 
heard. He loved Nature so well, was so happy 
in her solitude, that he became very jealous of 
cities, and the sad work which their refinements 
and artifices made with man and his dwelling. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 20 

The axe was always destroying his forest. 
"Thank God," he said, "they cannot cut down 
the clouds!" "All kinds of figures are drawn 
on the blue ground with this fibrous white 
paint." 

I subjoin a few sentences taken from his un- 
published manuscripts, not only as records of 
his thought and feeling, but for their power of 
description and literary excellence. 

"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, 
as when you find a trout in the milk." 

"The chub is a soft fish, and tastes like boiled 
brown paper salted." 

"The youth gets together his materials to 
build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a pal- 
ace or temple on the earth, and at length the 
middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed 
with them." 

"The locust z-ing." 

"Devil's-needles zigzagging along the Nut- 
Meadow brook." 

"Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound 
to the healthy ear." 

"I put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich 
salt crackling of their leaves was like mustard 
to the ear, the crackling of uncountable regi- 
ments. Dead trees love the fire." 

"The bluebird carries the sky on his back." 

"The taniger flies through the green foliage 
as if it would ignite the leaves." 



30 EXCURSIONS 

"If I wish for a horse-hair for my compass- 
sight, I must go to the stable ; but the hair-bird, 
with her sharp eyes, goes to the road." 

"Immortal water, alive even to the super- 
ficies." 

"Fire is the most tolerable third party." 

"Nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show 
what she could do in that line." 

"No tree has so fair a bole and so handsome 
an instep as the beech." 

"How did these beautiful rainbow-tints get 
into the shell of the fresh-water clam, buried in 
the mud at the bottom of our dark river?" 

"Hard are the times when the infant's shoes 
are second-foot." 

"We are strictly confined to our men to whom 
we give liberty-" 

"Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. 
Atheism may comparatively be popular with 
God himself." 

"Of what significance the things you can for- 
get ? A little thought is sexton to all the world." 

"How can we expect a harvest of thought 
who have not had a seed-time of character?" 

"Only he can be trusted with gifts who can 
present a face of bronze to expectations." 

"I ask to be melted. You can only ask of the 
metals that they be tender to the fire that melts 
them. To nought else can they be tender." 




Th ore aif ' s grave 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 31 

There is a flower known to botanists, one of 
the same genus with our summer plant called 
"Life-Everlasting," a Gnaphalium like that 
which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the 
Tyrolese mountains, where the chamois dare 
hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted 
by its beauty, and by his love (for it is immensely 
valued by the Swiss maidens), climbs the cliffs 
to gather, and is sometimes found dead at the 
foot, with the flower in his hand. It is called 
by botanists the Gnaphalium leontopodium, but 
by the Swiss Edelweisse, which signifies Noble 
Purity. Thoreau seemed to me living in the 
hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him 
of right. The scale on which his studies pro- 
ceeded was so large as to require longevity, and 
we were the less prepared for his sudden disap- 
pearance. The country knows not yet, or in the 
least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems 
an injury that he should leave in the midst his 
broken task, which none else can finish, — a kind 
of indignity to so noble a soul, that it should de- 
part out of Nature before yet he has been really 
shown to his peers for what he is. But he, at 
least, is content. His soul was made for the 
noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted 
the capabilities of this world; wherever there is 
knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever 
there is beauty, he will find a home. 



EXCURSIONS. 



NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHU- 
SETTS * 

[1842] 

BOOKS of natural history make the most 
cheerful winter reading. I read in Audu- 
bon with a thrill of delight, when the snow 
covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the 
Florida keys, and their warm sea-breezes ; of the 
fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migra- 
tions of the rice-bird; of the breaking up of 
winter in Labrador, and the melting of the snow 
on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an acces- 
sion of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant 
nature. 

Within the circuit of this plodding life, 
There enter moments of an azure hue, 
Untarnished fair as is the violet 
Or anemone, when the spring strews them 
By some meandering rivulet, which make 
The best philosophy untrue that aims 
But to console man for his grievances. 
I have remembered when the winter came, 
High in my chamber in the frosty nights, 

'Reports — on the Fishes, Reptiles, and Birds; the Herbaceous 
Plants and Quadrupeds; the Insects Injurious to Vegetation; and 
the Invertebrate Animals of Massachusetts. Published agreeably 
to an Order of the Legislature, by the Commissioners on the Zo- 
ological and Botanical Survey of the State. 

35 



EXCURSIONS 

When in the still light of the cheerful moon, 
On every twig and rail and jutting spout, 
The icy spears were adding to their length 
Against the arrows of the coming sun, 
How in the shimmering noon of summer past 
\ Some unrecorded beam slanted across 

The upland pastures where the Johnswort grew; 

OrTtear^, amid the verdure of my mind, 

The bee's long smothered hum, on the blue flag 

Loitering amidst the mead; or busy rill, 

Which now through all its course stands still and dumb 

Its own memorial, — purling at its play 

Along the slopes, and through the meadows next, 

Until its youthful sound was hushed at last 

In the staid current of the lowland stream; 

Or seen the furrows shine but late upturned, 

And where the fieldfare followed in the rear, 

When all the fields around lay bound and hoar 

Beneath a thick integument of snow. 

So by God's cheap economy made rich 

To go upon my winter's task again. 



I am singularly refreshed in winter when I 
hear of service-berries, poke-weed, juniper. Is 
not heaven made up of these cheap summer 
glories? There is a singular health in those 
words, Labrador and East Main, which no de- 
sponding creed recognizes. How much more 
than Federal are these States. If there were no 
other vicissitudes than the seasons, our interest 
would never tire. Much more is adoing than 
Congress wots of. What journal do the per- 
simmon and the buckeye keep, and the sharp- 
shinned hawk? What is transpiring from sum- 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 37 

mer to winter in the Carolinas, and the Great 
Pine Forest, and the Valley of the Mohawk? 
The merely political aspect of the land is never 
very cheering; men are degraded when consid- 
ered as the members of a political organization. 
On this side all lands present only the symptoms 
of decay. I see but Bunker Hill and Sing- Sing, 
the District of Columbia and Sullivan's Island, 
with a few avenues connecting them. But paltry 
are they all beside one blast of the east or the 
south wind which blows over them. 

In society you will not find health, but in nat- 
ure. Unless our feet at least stood in the midst 
of nature, all our faces would be pale and livid. 
Society is always deceased, and the best is the 
most so. There is no scent in it so wholesome as 
that of the pines, nor any fragrance so penetrat- 
ing and restorative as the life-everlasting in high 
pastures. I would keep some book of natural his- 
tory always by me as a sort of elixir, the reading 
of which should restore the tone of the system. 
To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the 
well, a fountain of health. To him who contem- 
plates a trait of natural beauty no harm nor 
disappointment can come. The doctrines of de- 
spair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servi- 
tude, were never taught by such as shared the 
serenity of nature. Surely good courage will 
not flag here on the Atlantic border, as long as 
we are flanked by the Fur Countries. There is 



38 EXCURSIONS 

enough in that sound to cheer one under any cir- 
cumstances. The spruce, the hemlock, and the 
pine will not countenance despair. Methinks 
some creeds in vestries and churches do forget 
the hunter wrapped in furs by the Great Slave 
Lake, and that the Esquimaux sledges are drawn 
by dogs, and in the twilight of the northern 
night, the hunter does not give over to follow 
the seal and walrus on the ice. They are sick 
and diseased imaginations who would toll the 
world's knell so soon. Cannot these sedentary 
sects do better than prepare the shrouds and 
write the epitaphs of those other busy living 
men? The practical faith of all men belies the 
preacher's consolation. What is any man's dis- 
course to me, if I am not sensible of something 
in it as steady and cheery as the creak of crickets ? 
In it the woods must be relieved against the 
sky. Men tire me when I am not constantly 
greeted and refreshed as by the flux of spark- 
ling streams. Surely joy is the condition of life. 
Think of the young fry that leap in ponds, the 
myriads of insects ushered into being on a sum- 
mer evening, the incessant note of the hyla with 
which the woods ring in the spring, the noncha- 
lance of the butterfly carrying accident and 
change painted in a thousand hues upon its 
wings, or the brook minnow stoutly stemming 
the current, the lustre of whose scales worn 
bright by the attrition, is reflected upon the bank. 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 39 

We fancy that this din of religion, literature, 
and philosophy, which is heard in pulpits, lyce- 
ums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, 
and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the 
earth's axle; but if a man sleep soundly, he will 
forget it all between sunset and dawn. It is the 
three-inch swing of a pendulum in a cupboard, 
which the great pulse of nature vibrates by and 
through each instant. When we lift our eyelids 
and open our ears, it disappears with smoke and 
rattle like the cars on a railroad. When I de- 
tect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, 
I am reminded, by the serene and retired spirit 
in which it requires to be contemplated, of the 
inexpressible privacy of a life, — how silent and 
unambitious it is. The beauty there is in mosses 
must be considered from the holiest, quietest 
nook. What an admirable training is science 
for the more active warfare of life. Indeed, the 
unchallenged bravery, which these studies imply, 
is far more impressive than the trumpeted valor 
of the warrior. I am pleased to learn that 
Thales was up and stirring by night not un- 
frequently, as his astronomical discoveries prove. 
Linnaeus, setting out for Lapland, surveys his 
"comb" and "spare shirt," "leathern breeches" 
and "gauze cap to keep off gnats," with as much 
complacency as Bonaparte a park of artillery 
for the Russian campaign. The quiet bravery 
of the man is admirable. His eye is to take in 



40 EXCURSIONS 

fish, flower, and bird, quadruped and biped. 
Science is always brave, for to know, is to know 
good; doubt and danger quail before her eye. 
What the coward overlooks in his hurry, she 
calmly scrutinizes, breaking ground like a pio- 
neer for the array of arts that follow in her 
train. But cowardice is unscientific; for there 
cannot be a science of ignorance. There may be 
a science of bravery, for that advances; but a 
retreat is rarely well conducted; if it is, then is 
it an orderly advance in the face of circum- 
stances. 

But to draw a little nearer to our promised 
topics. Entomology extends the limits of being 
in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with 
a sense of greater space and freedom. It sug- 
gests besides, that the universe is not rough- 
hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will 
bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay 
our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take 
an insect view of its plain. She has no inter- 
stices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, 
with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds 
which crowd the summer noon, and which seem 
the very grain and stuff of which eternity is 
made. Who does not remember the shrill roll- 
call of the harvest fly? There were ears for 
these sounds in Greece long ago, as Anacreon's 
ode will show. 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 41 

"We pronounce thee happy, Cicada, 
For on the tops of the trees, 
Drinking a little dew, 
Like any king thou singest, 
For thine are they all, 
Whatever thou seest in the fields, 
And whatever the woods bear. 
Thou art the friend of the husbandmen, 
In no respect injuring any one; 
And thou art honored among men, 
Sweet prophet of summer. 
The Muses love thee, 
And Phoebus himself loves thee, 
And has given thee a shrill song; 
Age does not wrack thee, 
Thou skilful, earthborn, song-loving, 
Unsuffering, bloodless one; 
Almost thou art like the gods." 

In the autumn days, the creaking of crickets 
is heard at noon over all the land, and as in 
summer they are heard chiefly at nightfall, so 
then by their incessant chirp they usher in the 
evening of the year. ISTor can all the vanities 
that vex the world alter one whit the measure 
that night has chosen. Every pulse-beat is in 
exact time with the cricket's chant and the tick- 
ings of the deathwatch in the wall. Alternate 
with these if you can. 

About two hundred and eighty birds either 
reside permanently in the State, or spend the 
summer only, or make us a passing visit. Those 
which spend the winter with us have obtained 



42 EXCURSIONS 

our warmest sympathy. The nut-hatch and 
chicadee flitting in company through the dells 
of the wood, the one harshly scolding at the in- 
truder, the other with a faint lisping note en- 
ticing him on; the jay screaming in the orchard; 
the crow cawing in unison with the storm; the 
partridge, like a russet link extended over from 
autumn to spring, preserving unbroken the chain 
of summers; the hawk with warrior-like firm- 
ness abiding the blasts of winter ; the robin 1 and 
lark lurking by warm springs in the woods; the 
familiar snow-bird culling a few seeds in the 
garden, or a few crumbs in the yard; and occa- 
sionally the shrike, with heedless and unfrozen 
melody bringing back summer again ; — 

His steady sails he never furls 
At any time o' year, 
And perching now on Winter's curls 
He whistles in his ear. 

As the spring advances, and the ice is melting 
in the river, our earliest and straggling visitors 
make their appearance. Again does the old 

1 A white robin and a white quail have occasionally been seen. 
It is mentioned in Audubon as remarkable that the nest of a 
robin should be found on the ground, but this bird seems to be 
less particular than most in the choice of a building spot. I have 
seen its nest placed under the thatched roof of a deserted barn, 
and in one instance, where the adjacent country was nearly des- 
titute of trees, together with two of the phoebe, upon the end of 
a board in the loft of a saw-mill, but a few feet from the saw, 
which vibrated several inches with the motion of the machinery. 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 43 

Teian poet sing, as well for New England as 
for Greece, in the 

RETURN OF SPRING 

"Behold, how Spring appearing, 
The Graces send forth roses; 
Behold, how the wave of the sea 
Is made smooth by the calm; 
Behold, how the duck dives; 
Behold, how the crane travels; 
And Titan shines constantly bright. 
The shadows of the clouds are moving; 
The works of man shine; 
The earth puts forth fruits; 
The fruit of the olive puts forth. 
The cup of Bacchus is crowned, 
Along the leaves, along the branches, 
The fruit, bending them down, flourishes." 

The ducks alight at this season in the still 
water, in company with the gulls, which do not 
fail to improve an east wind to visit our mead- 
ows, and swim about by twos and threes, plum- 
ing themselves, and diving to peck at the root 
of the lily, and the cranberries which the frost 
has not loosened. The first flock of geese is 
seen beating to north, in long harrows and wav- 
ing lines ; the gingle of the song-sparrow salutes 
us from the shrubs and fences ; the plaintive note 
of the lark comes clear and sweet from the mead- 
ow; and the bluebird, like an azure ray, glances 
past us in our walk. The fish-hawk, too,, is 
occasionally seen at this season sailing majesti- 



44 EXCURSIONS 

cally over the water, and he who has once ob- 
served it will not soon forget the majesty of its 
flight. It sails the air like a ship of the line, 
worthy to struggle with the elements, falling 
back from time to time like a ship on its beam 
ends, and holding its talons up as if ready for 
the arrows, in the attitude of the national bird. 
It is a great presence, as of the master of river 
and forest. Its eye would not quail before the 
owner of the soil, but make him feel like an in- 
truder on its domains. And then its retreat, 
sailing so steadily away, is a kind of advance. 
I have by me one of a pair of ospreys, which 
have for some years fished in this vicinity, shot 
by a neighboring pond, measuring more than 
two feet in length, and six in the stretch of its 
wings. Nuttall mentions that "The ancients, 
particularly Aristotle, pretended that the os- 
preys taught their young to gaze at the sun, 
and those who were unable to do so were de- 
stroyed. Linnaeus even believed, on ancient au- 
thoritv, that one of the feet of this bird had all 
the toes divided, while the other was partly 
webbed, so that it could swim with one foot, and 
grasp a fish with the other." But that educated 
eye is now dim, and those talons are nerveless. 
Its shrill scream seems yet to linger in its throat, 
and the roar of the sea in its wings. There is 
the tyranny of Jove in its claws, and his wrath 
in the erectile feathers of the head and neck. 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 45 

It reminds me of the Argonautic expedition, and 
would inspire the dullest to take flight over Par- 
nassus. 

The booming of the bittern, described by Gold- 
smith and Nuttall, is frequently heard in our 
fens, in the morning and evening, sounding like 
a pump, or the chopping of wood in a frosty 
morning in some distant farm-yard. The man- 
ner in which this sound is produced I have not 
seen anywhere described. On one occasion, the 
bird has been seen by one of my neighbors to 
thrust its bill into the water, and suck up as much 
as it could hold, then raising its head, it pumped 
it out again with four or five heaves of the neck, 
throwing it two or three feet, and making the 
sound each time. 

At length the summer's eternity is ushered in 
by the cackle of the flicker among the oaks on 
the hillside, and a new dynasty begins with calm 
security. 

In May and June the woodland quire is in full 
tune, and given the immense spaces of hollow 
air, and this curious human ear, one does not see 
how the void could be better filled. 

Each summer sound 
Is a summer round. 

As the season advances, and those birds which 
make us but a passing visit depart, the woods 
become silent again, and but few feathers ruffle 



46 EXCURSIONS 

the drowsy air. But the solitary rambler may 
still find a response and expression for every 
mood in the depth of the wood. 

Sometimes I hear the veery's * clarion, 

Or brazen trump of the impatient jay, 

And in secluded woods the chicadee 

Doles out her scanty notes, which sing the praise 

Of heroes, and set forth the loveliness 

Of virtue evermore. 

The phcebe still sings in harmony with the 
sultry weather by the brink of the pond, nor are 
the desultory hours of noon in the midst of the 
village without their minstrel. 

Upon the lofty elm-tree sprays 
The vireo rings the changes sweet, 
During the trivial summer days, 
Striving to lift our thoughts above the street. 

With the autumn begins in some measure a 
new spring. The plover is heard whistling high 
in the air over the dry pastures, the finches flit 
from tree to tree, the bobolinks and flickers fly 
in flocks, and the goldfinch rides on the earliest 
blast, like a winged hyla peeping amid the rustle 
of the leaves. The crows, too, begin now to 
congregate; you may stand and count them as 

1 This bird, which is so well described by Nuttall, but is ap- 
parently unknown by the author of the Report, is one of the most 
common in the woods in this vicinity, and in Cambridge I have 
heard the college yard ring with its trill. The boys call it 
"yorrick" from the sound of its querulous and chiding note, as it 
flits near the traveller through the underwood. The cowbird's egg 
is occasionally found in its nest, as mentioned by Audubon. 





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Harvard College yard, Cambridge 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 47 

they fly low and straggling over the landscape, 
singly or by twos and threes, at intervals of half 
a mile, until a hundred have passed. 

I have seen it suggested somewhere that the 
crow was brought to this country by the white 
man; but I shall as soon believe that the white 
man planted these pines and hemlocks. He is 
no spaniel to follow our steps; but rather flits 
about the clearings like the dusky spirit of the 
Indian, reminding me oftener of Philip and 
Powhatan, than of Winthrop and Smith. He 
is a relic of the dark ages. By just so slight, by 
just so lasting a tenure does superstition hold 
the world ever; there is the rook in England, 
and the crow in New England. 

Thou dusky spirit of the wood, 
Bird of an ancient brood, 
Flitting thy lonely way, 
A meteor in the summer's day, 
From wood to wood, from hill to hill, 
Low over forest, field, and rill, 
What wouldst thou say? 
Why shouldst thou haunt the day? 
What makes thy melancholy float? 
What bravery inspires thy throat, 
And bears thee up above the clouds, 
Over desponding human crowds, 
Which far below 
Lay thy haunts low? 

The late walker or sailor, in the October even- 
ings, may hear the murmurings of the snipe, 
circling over the meadows, the most spirit-like 



48 EXCURSIONS 

sound in nature; and still later in the autumn, 
when the frosts have tinged the leaves, a solitary 
loon pays a visit to our retired ponds, where he 
may lurk undisturbed till the season of moulting 
is passed, making the woods ring with his wild 
laughter. This bird, the Great Northern Diver, 
well deserves its name; for when pursued with 
a boat, it will dive, and swim like a fish under 
water, for sixty rods or more, as fast as a boat 
can be paddled, and its pursuer, if he would 
discover his game again, must put his ear to the 
surface to hear where it comes up. When it 
comes to the surface, it throws the water off with 
one shake of its wings, and calmly swims about 
until again disturbed. 

These are the sights and sounds which reach 
our senses oftenest during the year. But some- 
times one hears a quite new note, which has for 
background other Carolinas and Mexicos than 
the books describe, and learns that his ornithol- 
ogy has done him no service. 

It appears from the Report that there are 
about forty quadrupeds belonging to the State, 
and among these one is glad to hear of a few 
bears, wolves, lynxes, and wildcats. 

When our river overflows its banks in the 
spring, the wind from the meadows is laden with 
a strong scent of musk, and by its freshness ad- 
vertises me of an unexplored wildness. Those 
backwoods are not far off then. I am affected 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 49 

by the sight of the cabins of the musk-rat, made 
of mud and grass, and raised three or four feet 
along the river, as when I read of the barrows 
of Asia. The musk-rat is the beaver of the set- 
tled States. Their number has even increased 
within a few years in this vicinity. Among the 
rivers which empty into the Merrimack, the Con- 
cord is known to the boatmen as a dead stream. 
The Indians are said to have called it Musketa- 
quid, or Prairie River. Its current being much 
more sluggish, and its water more muddy than 
the rest, it abounds more in fish and game of 
every kind. According to the History of the 
town, "The fur- trade was here once very impor- 
tant. As early as 1641, a company was formed 
in the colony, of which Major Willard of Con- 
cord was superintendent, and had the exclusive 
right to trade with the Indians in furs and other 
articles; and for this right they were obliged to 
pay into the public treasury one twentieth of all 
the furs they obtained." There are trappers in 
our midst still, as well as on the streams of the 
far West, who night and morning go the round 
of their traps, without fear of the Indian. One 
of these takes from one hundred and fifty to 
two hundred musk-rats in a year, and even thir- 
ty-six have been shot by one man in a day. Their 
fur, which is not nearly as valuable as formerly, 
is in good condition in the winter and spring 
only; and upon the breaking up of the ice, when 



50 EXCURSIONS 

they are driven out of their holes by the water, 
the greatest number is shot from boats, either 
swimming or resting on their stools, or slight 
supports of grass and reeds, by the side of the 
stream. Though they exhibit considerable cun- 
ning at other times, they are easily taken in a 
trap, which has only to be placed in their holes, 
or wherever they frequent, without any bait be- 
ing used, though it is sometimes rubbed with 
their musk. In the winter the hunter cuts holes 
in the ice, and shoots them when they come to 
the surface. Their burrows are usually in the 
high banks of the river, with the entrance under 
water, and rising within to above the level of 
high water. Sometimes their nests, composed of 
dried meadow grass and flags, may be discov- 
ered where the bank is low and spongy, by the 
yielding of the ground under the feet. They 
have from three to seven or eight young in the 
spring. 

Frequently, in the morning or evening, a long 
ripple is seen in the still water, where a musk-rat 
is crossing the stream, with only its nose above 
the surface, and sometimes a green bough in its 
mouth to build its house with. When it finds 
itself observed, it will dive and swim five or six 
rods under water, and at length conceal itself 
in its hole, or the weeds. It will remain under 
water for ten minutes at a time, and on one 
occasion has been seen, when undisturbed, to 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 51 

form an air-bubble under the ice, which con- 
tracted and expanded as it breathed at leisure. 
When it suspects danger on shore, it will stand 
erect like a squirrel, and survey its neighborhood 
for several minutes, without moving. 

In the fall, if a meadow intervene between 
their burrows and the stream, they erect cabins 
of mud and grass, three or four feet high, near 
its edge. These are not their breeding-places, 
though young are sometimes found in them in 
late freshets, but rather their hunting-lodges, to 
which they resort in the winter with their food, 
and for shelter. Their food consists chiefly of 
flags and fresh-water mussels, the shells of the 
latter being left in large quantities around their 
lodges in the spring. 

The Penobscot Indian wears the entire skin 
of a musk-rat, with the legs and tail dangling, 
and the head caught under his girdle, for a 
pouch, into which he puts his fishing tackle, and 
essences to scent his traps with. 

The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, 
and marten, have disappeared ; the otter is rarely 
if ever seen here at present ; and the mink is less 
common than formerly. 

Perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the 
fox has obtained the widest and most familiar 
reputation, from the time of Pilpay and iEsop 
to the present day. His recent tracks still give 
variety to a winter's walk. I tread in the steps 



52 EXCURSIONS 

of the fox that has gone before me by some hours, 
or which perhaps I have started, with such a tip- 
toe of expectation, as if I were on the trail of 
the Spirit itself which resides in the wood, and 
expected soon to catch it in its lair. I am curi- 
ous to know what has determined its graceful 
curvatures, and how surely they were coincident 
with the fluctuations of some mind. I know 
which way a mind wended, what horizon it faced, 
by the setting of these tracks, and whether it 
moved slowly or rapidly, by their greater or less 
intervals and distinctness; for the swiftest step 
leaves yet a lasting trace. Sometimes you will 
see the trails of many together, and where they 
have gambolled and gone through a hundred 
evolutions, which testify to a singular listless- 
ness and leisure in nature. 

When I see a fox run across the pond on the 
snow, with the carelessness of freedom, or at 
intervals trace his course in the sunshine along 
the ridge of a hill, I give up to him sun and 
earth as to their true proprietor. He does not 
go in the sun, but it seems to follow him, and 
there is a visible sympathy between him and it. 
Sometimes, when the snow lies light, and but 
five or six inches deep, you may give chase and 
come up with one on foot. In such a case he will 
show a remarkable presence of mind, choosing 
only the safest direction, though he may lose 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 53 

ground by it. Notwithstanding his fright, he 
will take no step which is not beautiful. His 
pace is a sort of leopard canter, as if he were in 
nowise impeded by the snow, but were husband- 
ing his strength all the while. When the ground 
is uneven, the course is a series of graceful 
curves, conforming to the shape of the surface. 
He runs as though there were not a bone in his 
back. Occasionally dropping his muzzle to the 
ground for a rod or two, and then tossing his 
head aloft, when satisfied of his course. When 
he comes to a declivity, he will put his forefeet 
together, and slide swiftly down it, shoving the 
snow before him. He treads so softly that you 
would hardly hear it from any nearness, and yet 
with such expression that it would not be quite 
inaudible at any distance. 

Of fishes, seventy-five genera and one hun- 
dred and seven species are described in the Re- 
port. The fisherman will be startled to learn 
that there are but about a dozen kinds in the 
ponds and streams of any inland town; and al- 
most nothing is known of their habits. Only 
their names and residence make one love fishes. 
I would know even the number of their fin-rays, 
and how many scales compose the lateral line. 
I am the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and 
the better qualified for all fortunes, for knowing 



54 EXCURSIONS 

that there is a minnow in the brook. Methinks 
I have need even of his sympathy, and to be his 
fellow in a degree. 

I have experienced such simple delight in the 
trivial matters of fishing and sporting, formerly, 
as might have inspired the muse of Homer or 
Shakspeare; and now, when I turn the pages 
and ponder the plates of the Angler's Souvenir, 
I am fain to exclaim, — 

"Can these things be, 
And overcome us like a summer's cloud?" 

Next to nature, it seems as if man's actions 
were the most natural, they so gently accord with 
her. The small seines of flax stretched across 
the shallow and transparent parts of our river, 
are no more intrusion than the cobweb in the 
sun. I stay my boat in midcurrent, and look 
down in the sunny water to see the civil meshes 
of his nets, and wonder how the blustering peo- 
ple of the town could have done this elvish work. 
The twine looks like a new river weed, and is to 
the river as a beautiful memento of man's pres- 
ence in nature, discovered as silently and deli- 
cately as a footprint in the sand. 

When the ice is covered with snow, I do not 
suspect the wealth under my feet; that there is 
as good as a mine under me wherever I go. 
How many pickerel are poised on easy fin fath- 
oms below the loaded wain. The revolution of 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 55 

the seasons must be a curious phenomenon to 
them. At length the sun and wind brush aside 
their curtain, and they see the heavens again. 

Early in the spring, after the ice has melted, 
is the time for spearing fish. Suddenly the wind 
shifts from northeast and east to west and south, 
and every icicle, which has tinkled on the mead- 
ow grass so long, trickles down its stem, and 
seeks its level unerringly with a million com- 
rades. The steam curls up from every roof and 
fence. 

I see the civil sun drying earth's tears, 
Her tears of joy, which only faster flow. 

In the brooks is heard the slight grating sound 
of small cakes of ice, floating with various speed, 
full of content and promise, and where the water 
gurgles under a natural bridge, you may hear 
these hasty rafts hold conversation in an under- 
tone. Every rill is a channel for the juices of 
the meadow. In the ponds the ice cracks with 
a merry and inspiriting din, and down the larger 
streams is whirled grating hoarsely, and crash- 
ing its way along, which was so lately a highway 
for the woodman's team and the fox, sometimes 
with the tracks of the skaters still fresh upon it, 
and the holes cut for pickerel. Town committees 
anxiously inspect the bridges and causeways, as 
if by mere eye-force to intercede with the ice, 
and save the treasury. 



56 EXCURSIONS 

The river swelleth more and more, 
Like some sweet influence stealing o'er 
The passive town; and for a while 
Each tussuck makes a tiny isle, 
Where, on some friendly Ararat, 
Resteth the weary water-rat. 

No ripple shows Musketaquid, 

Her very current e'en is hid, 

As deepest souls do calmest rest, 

When thoughts are swelling in the breast, 

And she that in the summer's drought 

Doth make a rippling and a rout, 

Sleeps from Nahshawtuck to the Cliff, 

Unruffled by a single skiff. 

But by a thousand distant hills 

The louder roar a thousand rills, 

And many a spring which now is dumb, 

And many a stream with smothered hum, 

Doth swifter well and faster glide, 

Though buried deep beneath the tide. 

Our village shows a rural Venice, 
Its broad lagoons where yonder fen is; 
As lovely as the Bay of Naples 
Yon placid cove amid the maples; 
And in my neighbor's field of corn 
I recognize the Golden Horn. 
Here Nature taught from year to year, 
When only red men came to hear, 
Methinks 'twas in this school of art 
Venice and Naples learned their part; 
But still their mistress, to my mind, 
Her young disciples leaves behind. 

The fisherman now repairs and launches his 
boat. The best time for spearing is at this sea- 




-Otf 



*3 






>3 



o 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 57 

son, before the weeds have begun to grow, and 
while the fishes lie in the shallow water, for in 
summer they prefer the cool depths, and in the 
autumn they are still more or less concealed by 
the grass. The first requisite is fuel for your 
crate ; and for this purpose the roots of the pitch- 
pine are commonly used, found under decayed 
stumps, where the trees have been felled eight 
or ten years. 

With a crate, or jack, made of iron hoops, to 
contain your fire, and attached to the bow of 
your boat about three feet from the water, a fish- 
spear with seven tines, and fourteen feet long, 
a large basket, or barrow, to carry your fuel and 
bring back your fish, and a thick outer garment, 
you are equipped for a cruise. It should be a 
warm and still evening; and then with a fire 
crackling merrily at the prow, you may launch 
forth like a cucullo into the night. The dullest 
soul cannot go upon such an expedition without 
some of the spirit of adventure; as if he had 
stolen the boat of Charon and gone down the 
Styx on a midnight expedition into the realms of 
Pluto. And much speculation does this wander- 
ing star afford to the musing nightwalker, lead- 
ing him on and on, jack-o'-lantern-like, over the 
meadows; or, if he is wiser, he amuses himself 
with imagining what of human life, far in the 
silent night, is flitting mothlike round its candle. 
The silent navigator shoves his craft gently over 



58 EXCURSIONS 

the water, with a smothered pride and sense of 
benefaction, as if he were the phosphor, or light- 
bringer, to these dusky realms, or some sister 
moon, blessing the spaces with her light. The 
waters, for a rod or two on either hand and sev- 
eral feet in depth, are lit up with more than noon- 
day distinctness, and he enjoys the opportunity 
which so many have desired, for the roofs of a 
city are indeed raised, and he surveys the mid- 
night economy of the fishes. There they lie in 
every variety of posture; some on their backs, 
with their white bellies uppermost, some sus- 
pended in midwater, some sculling gently along 
with a dreamy motion of the fins, and others 
quite active and wide awake, — a scene not unlike 
what the human city would present. Occasion- 
ally he will encounter a turtle selecting the 
choicest morsels, or a musk-rat resting on a tus- 
suck. He may exercise his dexterity, if he sees 
fit, on the more distant and active fish, or fork 
the nearer into his boat, as potatoes out of a pot, 
or even take the sound sleepers with his hands. 
But these last accomplishments he will soon learn 
to dispense with, distinguishing the real object 
of his pursuit, and find compensation in the 
beauty and never-ending novelty of his position. 
The pines growing down to the water's edge will 
show newly as in the glare of a conflagration ; 
and as he floats under the willows with his light, 
the song-sparrow will often wake on her perch, 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 59 

and sing that strain at midnight, which she had 
meditated for the morning. And when he has 
done, he may have to steer his way home through 
the dark by the north star, and he will feel him- 
self some degrees nearer to it for having lost his 
way on the earth. 

The fishes commonly taken in this way are 
pickerel, suckers, perch, eels, pouts, breams, and 
shiners, — from thirty to sixty weight in a night. 
Some are hard to be recognized in the unnatural 
light, especially the perch, which, his dark bands 
being exaggerated, acquires a ferocious aspect. 
The number of these transverse bands, which the 
Report states to be seven, is, however, very vari- 
able, for in some of our ponds they have nine and 
ten even. 

It appears that we have eight kinds of tor- 
toises, twelve snakes, — but one of which is ven- 
omous, — nine frogs and toads, nine salamanders, 
and one lizard, for our neighbors. 

I am particularly attracted by the motions of 
the serpent tribe. They make our hands and 
feet, the wings of the bird, and the fins of the 
fish seem very superfluous, as if nature had only 
indulged her fancy in making them. The black 
snake will dart into a bush when pursued, and 
circle round and round with an easy and grace- 
ful motion, amid the thin and bare twigs, five 
or six feet from the ground, as a bird flits from 



60 EXCURSIONS 

bough to bough, or hang in festoons between the 
forks. Elasticity and flexibleness in the simpler 
forms of animal life are equivalent to a complex 
system of limbs in the higher; and we have only 
to be as wise and wily as the serpent, to perform 
as difficult feats without the vulgar assistance 
of hands and feet. 

In May, the snapping turtle, Emysaurus ser- 
pentina, is frequently taken on the meadows and 
in the river. The fisherman, taking sight over 
the calm surface, discovers its snout projecting 
above the water, at the distance of many rods, 
and easily secures his prey through its unwilling- 
ness to disturb the water by swimming hastily 
away, for, gradually drawing its head under, it 
remains resting on some limb or clump of grass. 
Its eggs, which are buried at a distance from 
the water, in some soft place, as a pigeon-bed, 
are frequently devoured by the skunk. It will 
catch fish by daylight, as a toad catches flies, 
and is said to emit a transparent fluid from its 
mouth to attract them. 

Nature has taken more care than the fondest 
parent for the education and refinement of her 
children. Consider the silent influence which 
flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the 
meadow than the lady in the bower. When I 
walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise 
purveyor has been there before me; my most 
delicate experience is typified there. I am 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 61 

struck with the pleasing friendships and unanim- 
ities of nature, as when the lichen on the trees 
takes the form of their leaves. In the most 
stupendous scenes you will see delicate and frag- 
ile features, as slight wreaths of vapor, dewlines, 
feathery sprays, which suggest a high refine- 
ment, a noble blood and breeding, as it were. 
It is not hard to account for elves and fairies; 
they represent this light grace, this ethereal gen- 
tility. Bring a spray from the wood, or a crys- 
tal from the brook, and place it on your mantel, 
and your household ornaments will seem ple- 
beian beside its nobler fashion and bearing. It 
will wave superior there, as if used to a more 
refined and polished circle. It has a salute and 
a response to all your enthusiasm and heroism. 

In the winter, I stop short in the path to ad- 
mire how the trees grow up without forethought, 
regardless of the time and circumstances. They 
do not wait as man does, but now is the golden 
age of the sapling. Earth, air, sun, and rain, 
are occasion enough; they were no better in pri- 
meval centuries. The "winter of their discon- 
tent" never comes. Witness the buds of the na- 
tive poplar standing gayly out to the frost on 
the sides of its bare switches. They express a 
naked confidence. With cheerful heart one could 
be a sojourner in the wilderness, if he were 
sure to find there the catkins of the willow or 
the alder. When I read of them in the accounts 



62 EXCURSIONS 

of northern adventurers, by Baffin's Bay or 
Mackenzie's River, I see how even there too I 
could dwell. They are our little vegetable re- 
deemers. Methinks our virtue will hold out till 
they come again. They are worthy to have had 
a greater than Minerva or Ceres for their in- 
ventor. Who was the benignant goddess that 
bestowed them on mankind? 

Nature is mythical and mystical always, and 
works with the license and extravagance of ge- 
nius. She has her luxurious and florid style as 
well as art. Having a pilgrim's cup to make, 
she gives to the whole, stem, bowl, handle, and 
nose, some fantastic shape, as if it were to be the 
car of some fabulous marine deity, a Nereus or 
Triton. 

In the winter, the botanist needs not confine 
himself to his books and herbarium, and give 
over his out-door pursuits, but may study a new 
department of vegetable physiology, what may 
be called crystalline botany, then. The winter 
of 1837 was unusually favorable for this. In 
December of that year, the Genius of vegetation 
seemed to hover by night over its summer haunts 
with unusual persistency. Such a hoar-frost, as 
is very uncommon here or anywhere, and whose 
full effects can never be witnessed after sunrise, 
occurred several times. As I went forth early 
on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked 
like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 63 

on this side huddled together with their gray 
hairs streaming in a secluded valley, which the 
sun had not penetrated; on that hurrying off in 
Indian file along some watercourse, while the 
shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the 
night, sought to hide their diminished heads in 
the snow. The river, viewed from the high bank, 
appeared of a yellowish green color, though all 
the landscape was white. Every tree, shrub, and 
spire of grass, that could raise its head above the 
snow, was covered with a dense ice-foliage, an- 
swering, as.it were, leaf for leaf to its summer 
dress. Even the fences had put forth leaves in 
the night. The centre, diverging, and more 
minute fibres were perfectly distinct, and the 
edges regularly indented. These leaves were on 
the side of the twig or stubble opposite to the 
sun, meeting it for the most part at right angles, 
and there were others standing out at all possi- 
ble angles upon these and upon one another, 
with no twig or stubble supporting them. When 
the first rays of the sun slanted over the scene, 
the grasses seemed hung with innumerable jew- 
els, which jingled merrily as they were brushed 
by the foot of the traveller, and reflected all the 
hues of the rainbow as he moved from side to 
side. It struck me that these ghost leaves, and 
the green ones whose forms they assume, were 
the creatures of but one law; that in obedience 
to the same law the vegetable juices swell grad- 



64 EXCURSIONS 

ually into the perfect leaf, on the one hand, and 
the crystalline particles troop to their standard 
in the same order, on the other. As if the mate- 
rial were indifferent, but the law one and invari- 
able, and every plant in the spring but pushed 
up into and filled a permanent and eternal 
mould, which, summer and winter forever, is 
waiting to be filled. 

This foliate structure is common to the coral 
and the plumage of birds, and to how large a 
part of animate and inanimate nature. The 
same independence of law on matter is observ- 
able in many other instances, as in the natural 
rhymes, when some animal form, color, or odor, 
has its counterpart in some vegetable. As, in- 
deed, all rhymes imply an eternal melody, inde- 
pendent of any particular sense. 

As confirmation of the fact, that vegetation is 
but a kind of crystallization, every one may ob- 
serve how, upon the edge of the melting frost 
on the window, the needle-shaped particles are 
bundled together so as to resemble fields wav- 
ing with grain, or shocks rising here and there 
from the stubble; on one side the vegetation of 
the torrid zone, high-towering palms and wide- 
spread banyans, such as are seen in pictures of 
oriental scenery; on the other, arctic pines stiff 
frozen, with downcast branches. 

Vegetation has been made the type of all 
growth; but as in crystals the law is more obvi- 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 65 

ous, their material being more simple, and for 
the most part more transient and fleeting, would 
it not be as philosophical as convenient to con- 
sider all growth, all filling up within the limits 
of nature, but a crystallization more or less 
rapid? 

On this occasion, in the side of the high bank 
of the river, wherever the water or other cause 
had formed a cavity, its throat and outer edge, 
like the entrance to a citadel, bristled with a 
glistening ice-armor. In one place you might 
see minute ostrich-feathers, which seemed the 
waving plumes of the warriors filing into the 
fortress; in another, the glancing, fan-shaped 
banners of the Lilliputian host; and in another, 
the needle-shaped particles collected into bun- 
dles, resembling the plumes of the pine, might 
pass for a phalanx of spears. From the under 
side of the ice in the brooks, where there was a 
thicker ice below, depended a mass of crystal- 
lization, four or five inches deep, in the form of 
prisms, with their lower ends open, which, when 
the ice was laid on its smooth side, resembled the 
roofs and steeples of a Gothic city, or the ves- 
sels of a crowded haven under a press of canvas. 
The very mud in the road, where the ice had 
melted, was crystallized with deep rectilinear fis- 
sures, and the crystalline masses in the sides of 
the ruts resembled exactly asbestos in the dispo- 
sition of their needles. Around the roots of the 



66 EXCURSIONS 

stubble and flower-stalks, the frost was gathered 
into the form of irregular conical shells, or fairy 
rings. In some places the ice-crystals were lying 
upon granite rocks, directly over crystals of 
quartz, the frost-work of a longer night, crystals 
of a longer period, but to some eye unprejudiced 
by the short term of human life, melting as fast 
as the former. 

In the Report on the Invertebrate Animals, 
this singular fact is recorded, which teaches us 
to put a new value on time and space. "The 
distribution of the marine shells is well worthy 
of notice as a geological fact. Cape Cod, the 
right arm of the Commonwealth, reaches out into 
the ocean, some fifty or sixty miles. It is no- 
where many miles wide; but this narrow point 
of land has hitherto proved a barrier to the mi- 
grations of many species of Mollusca. Several 
genera and numerous species, which are sepa- 
rated by the intervention of only a few miles of 
land, are effectually prevented from mingling 
by the Cape, and do not pass from one side to 
the other. ... Of the one hundred and ninety- 
seven marine species, eighty-three do not pass to 
the south shore, and fifty are not found on the 
north shore of the Cape." 

That common mussel, the JJnio complanatus, 
or more properly fluviatilis, left in the spring 
by the musk-rat upon rocks and stumps, ap- 
pears to have been an important article of food 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 67 

with the Indians. In one place, where they are 
said to have feasted, they are found in large 
quantities, at an elevation of thirty feet above 
the river, filling the soil to the depth of a foot, 
and mingled with ashes and Indian remains. 

The works we have placed at the head of our 
chapter, with as much license as the preacher 
selects his text, are such as imply more labor 
than enthusiasm. The State wanted complete 
catalogues of its natural riches, with such addi- 
tional facts merely as would be directly useful. 

The reports on Fishes, Reptiles, Insects, and 
Invertebrate Animals, however, indicate labor 
and research, and have a value independent of 
the object of the legislature. 

Those on Herbaceous Plants and Birds can- 
not be of much value, as long as Bigelow and 
Nuttall are accessible. They serve but to indi- 
cate, with more or less exactness, what species 
are found in the State. We detect several errors 
ourselves, and a more practised eye would no 
doubt expand the list. 

The Quadrupeds deserved a more final and 
instructive report than they have obtained. 

These volumes deal much in measurements 
and minute descriptions, not interesting to the 
general reader, with only here and there a col- 
ored sentence to allure him, like those plants 
growing in dark forests, which bear only leaves 
without blossoms. But the ground was compar- 



68 EXCURSIONS 

atively unbroken, and we will not complain of 
the pioneer, if he raises no flowers with his first 
crop. Let us not underrate the value of a fact; 
it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonish- 
ing how few facts of importance are added in a 
century to the natural history of any animal. 
The natural history of man himself is still being 
gradually written. Men are knowing enough 
after their fashion. Every countryman and 
dairymaid knows that the coats of the fourth 
stomach of the calf will curdle milk, and what 
particular mushroom is a safe and nutritious 
diet. You cannot go into any field or wood, but 
it will seem as if every stone had been turned, 
and the bark on every tree ripped up. But, after 
all, it is much easier to discover than to see when 
the cover is off. It has been well said that "the 
attitude of inspection is prone." Wisdom does 
not inspect, but behold. We must look a long 
time before we can see. Slow are the beginnings 
of philosophy. He has something demoniacal 
in him, who can discern a law or couple two facts. 
We can imagine a time when, — "Water runs 
down hill," — may have been taught in the 
schools. The true man of science will know nat- 
ure better by his finer organization; he will 
smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. 
His will be a deeper and finer experience. We 
do not learn by inference and deduction, and the 
application of mathematics to philosophy, but by 



HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS 69 

direct intercourse and sympathy. It is with sci- 
ence as with ethics, — we cannot know truth by 
contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false 
as any other, and with all the helps of machinery 
and the arts, the most scientific will still be the 
healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a 
more perfect Indian wisdom. 



A WALK TO WACHUSETT 

[ 1843 ] 

The needles of the pine 
All to the west incline. 

Concord, July 19, 1842. 

SUMMER and winter our eyes had rested 
on the dim outline of the mountains in our 
horizon, to which distance and indistinct- 
ness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they 
served equally to interpret all the allusions of 
poets and travellers; whether with Homer, on 
a spring morning, we sat down on the many- 
peaked Olympus, or, with Virgil and his com- 
peers, roamed the Etrurian and Thessalian hills, 
or with Humboldt measured the more modern 
Andes and Teneriffe. Thus we spoke our mind 
to them, standing on the Concord cliffs : — 

With frontier strength ye stand your ground, 
With grand content ye circle round, 
Tumultuous silence for all sound, 
Ye distant nursery of rills, 
Monadnock, and the Peterboro' hills; 
Like some vast fleet, 
Sailing through rain and sleet, 
Through winter's cold and summer's heat; 
Still holding on, upon your high emprise, 
Until ye find a shore amid the skies; 

70 



A WALK TO WACHUSETT 71 

Not skulking close to land, 

With cargo contraband, 

For they who sent a venture out by ye 

Have set the sun to see 

Their honesty. 

Ships of the line, each one, 

Ye to the westward run, 

Always before the gale, 

Under a press of sail, 

With weight of metal all untold. 

I seem to feel ye, in my firm seat here, 

Immeasurable depth of hold, 

And breadth of beam, and length of running gear. 

Methinks ye take luxurious pleasure 

In your novel western leisure; 

So cool your brows, and freshly blue, 

As Time had nought for ye to do; 

For ye lie at your length, 

An unappropriated strength, 

Unhewn primeval timber, 

For knees so stiff, for masts so limber; 

The stock of which new earths are made, 

One day to be our western trade, 

Fit for the stanchions of a world 

Which through the seas of space is hurled. 

While we enj oy a lingering ray, 

Ye still o'ertop the western day, 

Reposing yonder, on God's croft, 

Like solid stacks of hay. 

Edged with silver, and with gold, 

The clouds hang o'er in damask fold, 

And with such depth of amber light 

The west is dight, 

Where still a few rays slant, 

That even heaven seems extravagant. 



72 EXCURSIONS 

On the earth's edge mountains and trees 

Stand as they were on air graven, 

Or as the vessels in a haven 

Await the morning breeze. 

I fancy even 

Through your defiles windeth the way to heaven; 

And yonder still, in spite of history's page, 

Linger the golden and the silver age; 

Upon the laboring gale 

The news of future centuries is brought, 

And of new dynasties of thought, 

From your remotest vale. 

But special I remember thee, 

Wachusett, who like me 

Standest alone without society. 

Thy far blue eye, 

A remnant of the sky, 

Seen through the clearing or the gorge, 

Or from the windows on the forge, 

Doth leaven all it passes by. 

Nothing is true, 

But stands 'tween me and you, 

Thou western pioneer 

Who know'st not shame nor fear, 

By venturous spirit driven, 

Under the eaves of heaven, 

And can'st expand thee there, 

And breathe enough of air? 

Upholding heaven, holding down earth, 

Thy pastime from thy birth, 

Not steadied by the one nor leaning on the other; 

May I approve myself thy worthy brother! 

At length, like Rasselas, and other inhabitants 
of happy valleys, we resolved to scale the blue 
wall which bound the western horizon, though 



A WALK TO WACHUSETT 73 

not without misgivings, that thereafter no visible 
fairy land would exist for us. But we will not 
leap at once to our journey's end, though near, 
but imitate Homer, who conducts his reader 
over the plain, and along the resounding sea, 
though it be but to the tent of Achilles. In the 
spaces of thought are the reaches of land and 
water, where men go and come. The landscape 
lies far and fair within, and the deepest thinker 
is the farthest travelled. 

At a cool and early hour on a pleasant morn- 
ing in July, my companion and I passed rapidly 
through Acton and Stow, stopping to rest and 
refresh us on the bank of a small stream, a tribu- 
tary of the Assabet, in the latter town. As we 
traversed the cool woods of Acton, with stout 
staves in our hands, we were cheered by the song 
of the red-eye, the thrushes, the phoebe, and the 
cuckoo ; and as we passed through the open coun- 
try, we inhaled the fresh scent of every field, and 
all nature lay passive, to be viewed and travelled. 
Every rail, every farm-house, seen dimly in the 
twilight, every tinkling sound told of peace and 
purity, and we moved happily along the dank 
roads, enjoying not such privacy as the day 
leaves when it withdraws, but such as it has not 
profaned. It was solitude with light; which is 
better than darkness. But anon, the sound of 
the mower's rifle was heard in the fields, and 
this, too, mingled with the lowing kine. 



74 EXCURSIONS 

This part of our route lay through the country 
of hops, which plant perhaps supplies the want of 
the vine in American scenery, and may remind 
the traveller of Italy, and the South of France, 
whether he traverses the country when the hop- 
fields, as then, present solid and regular masses 
of verdure, hanging in graceful festoons from 
pole to pole ; the cool coverts where lurk the gales 
which refresh the wayfarer; or in September, 
when the women and children, and the neigh- 
bors from far and near, are gathered to pick the 
hops into long troughs; or later still, when the 
poles stand piled in vast pyramids in the yards, 
or lie in heaps by the roadside. 

The culture of the hop, with the processes of 
picking, drying in the kiln, and packing for the 
market, as well as the uses to which it is applied, 
so analogous to the culture and uses of the grape, 
may afford a theme for future poets. 

The mower in the adjacent meadow could not 
tell us the name of the brook on whose banks we 
had rested, or whether it had any, but his younger 
companion, perhaps his brother, knew that it 
was Great Brook. Though they stood very near 
together in the field, the things they knew were 
very far apart ; nor did they suspect each other's 
reserved knowledge, till the stranger came by. 
In Bolton, while we rested on the rails of a cot- 
tage fence, the strains of music which issued 
from within, probably in compliment to us, so- 




^ 



^ 



^ 



A WALK TO WACHUSETT 75 

journers, reminded us that thus far men were 
fed by the accustomed pleasures. So soon did 
we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man's life is 
rounded with the same few facts, the same sim- 
ple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel 
to find it new. The flowers grow more various 
ways than he. But coming soon to higher land, 
which afforded a prospect of the mountains, we 
thought we had not travelled in vain, if it were 
only to hear a truer and wilder pronunciation of 
their names, from the lips of the inhabitants; 
not Way-tsitic, Way-chusett, but JFor-tatic, 
JFor-chusett. It made us ashamed of our tame 
and civil pronunciation, and we looked upon them 
as born and bred farther west than we. Their 
tongues had a more generous accent than ours, 
as if breath was cheaper where they wagged. A 
countryman, who speaks but seldom, talks copi- 
ously, as it were, as his wife sets cream and cheese 
before you without stint. Before noon we had 
reached the highlands overlooking the valley of 
Lancaster, (affording the first fair and open 
prospect into the west,) and there, on the top of 
a hill, in the shade of some oaks, near to where 
a spring bubbled out from a leaden pipe, we 
rested during the heat of the day, reading Vir- 
gil, and enjoying the scenery. It was such a 
place as one feels to be on the outside of the 
earth, for from it we could, in some measure, see 
the form and structure of the globe. There lay 



76 EXCURSIONS 

Wachusett, the object of our journey, lowering 
upon us with unchanged proportions, though 
with a less ethereal aspect than had greeted our 
morning gaze, while further north, in successive 
order, slumbered its sister mountains along the 
horizon. 

We could get no further into the iEneid than 

— atque altae mcenia Romae, 
— and the wall of high Rome, 

before we were constrained to reflect by what 
myriad tests a work of genius has to be tried; 
that Virgil, away in Rome, two thousand years 
off, should have to unfold his meaning, the in- 
spiration of Italian vales, to the pilgrim on New 
England hills. This life so raw and modern, 
that so civil and ancient; and yet we read Vir- 
gil, mainly to be reminded of the identity of hu- 
man nature in all ages, and, by the poet's own 
account, we are both the children of a late age, 
and live equally under the reign of Jupiter. 

"He shook honey from the leaves, and removed fire, 
And stayed the wine, everywhere flowing in rivers; 
That experience, by meditating, might invent various arts 
By degrees, and seek the blade of corn in furrows, 
And strike out hidden fire from the veins of the flint/' 

The old world stands serenely behind the new, 
as one mountain yonder towers behind another, 
more dim and distant. Rome imposes her story 
still upon this late generation. The very chil- 
dren in the school we had that morning passed, 



A WALK TO WACHUSETT 77 

had gone through her wars, and recited her 
alarms, ere they had heard of the wars of neigh- 
boring Lancaster. The roving eye still rests in- 
evitably on her hills, and she still holds up the 
skirts of the sky on that side, and makes the past 
remote. 

The lay of the land hereabouts is well worthy 
the attention of the traveller. The hill on which 
we were resting made part of an extensive range, 
running from southwest to northeast, across the 
country, and separating the waters of the Nashua 
from those of the Concord, whose banks we had 
left in the morning ; and by bearing in mind this 
fact, we could easily determine whither each 
brook was bound that crossed our path. Paral- 
lel to this, and fifteen miles further west, beyond 
the deep and broad valley in which lie Groton, 
Shirley, Lancaster, and Boylston, runs the Wa- 
chusett range, in the same general direction. 
The descent into the valley on the Nashua side, 
is by far the most sudden ; and a couple of miles 
brought us to the southern branch of the Nashua, 
a shallow but rapid stream, flowing between high 
and gravelly banks. But we soon learned that 
there were no gelidce voiles into which we had de- 
scended, and missing the coolness of the morning 
air, feared it had become the sun's turn to try his 
power upon us. 

"The sultry sun had gained the middle sky, 
And not a tree, and not an herb was nigh," 



78 EXCURSIONS 

and with melancholy pleasure we echoed the me- 
lodious plaint of our fellow-traveller, Massan, in 
the desert, — 

"Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day, 
When first from Schiraz' walls I bent my way." 

The air lay lifeless between the hills, as in a 
seething caldron, with no leaf stirring, and in- 
stead of the fresh odor of grass and clover, with 
which we had before been regaled, the dry scent 
of every herb seemed merely medicinal. Yielding, 
therefore, to the heat, we strolled into the woods, 
and along the course of a rivulet, on whose banks 
we loitered, observing at our leisure the prod- 
ucts of these new fields. He who traverses the 
woodland paths, at this season, will have oc- 
casion to remember the small drooping bell- 
like flowers and slender red stem of the dogs- 
bane, and the coarser stem and berry of the poke, 
which are both common in remoter and wilder 
scenes; and if "the sun casts such a reflecting 
heat from the sweet fern," as makes him faint, 
when he is climbing the bare hills, as they com- 
plained who first penetrated into these parts, 
the cool fragrance of the swamp pink restores 
him again, when traversing the valleys between. 

As we went on our way late in the afternoon, 
we refreshed ourselves by bathing our feet in 
every rill that crossed the road, and anon, as we 
were able to walk in the shadows of the hills, re- 



A WALK TO WACHUSETT 79 

covered our morning elasticity. Passing through 
Sterling, we reached the banks of the Stillwater, 
in the western part of the town, at evening, 
where is a small village collected. We fancied 
that there was already a certain western look 
about this place, a smell of pines and roar of 
water, recently confined by dams, belying its 
name, which were exceedingly grateful. When 
the first inroad has been made, a few acres lev- 
elled, and a few houses erected, the forest looks 
wilder than ever. Left to herself, nature is al- 
ways more or less civilized, and delights in a cer- 
tain refinement; but where the axe has en- 
croached upon the edge of the forest, the dead 
and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had 
concealed with green banks of verdure, are ex- 
posed to sight. This village had, as yet, no post- 
office, nor any settled name. In the small vil- 
lages which we entered, the villagers gazed after 
us, with a complacent, almost compassionate 
look, as if we were just making our debut in the 
world at a late hour. "Nevertheless," did they 
seem to say, "come and study us, and learn men 
and manners." So is each one's world but a 
clearing in the forest, so much open and inclosed 
ground. The landlord had not yet returned from 
the field with his men, and the cows had yet to 
be milked. But we remembered the inscription 
on the wall of the Swedish inn, "You will find 
at Trolhate excellent bread, meat, and wine, 



80 EXCURSIONS 

provided you bring them with you," and were 
contented. But I must confess it did somewhat 
disturb our pleasure, in this withdrawn spot, to 
have our own village newspaper handed us by 
our host, as if the greatest charm the country 
offered to the traveller was the facility of com- 
munication with the town. Let it recline on its 
own everlasting hills, and not be looking out 
from their summits for some petty Boston or 
New York in the horizon. 

At intervals we heard the murmuring of 
water, and the slumberous breathing of crickets 
throughout the night; and left the inn the next 
morning in the gray twilight, after it had been 
hallowed by the night air, and when only the in- 
nocent cows were stirring, with a kind of regret. 
It was only four miles to the base of the moun- 
tain, and the scenery was already more pic- 
turesque. Our road lay along the course of the 
Stillwater, which was brawling at the bottom 
of a deep ravine, filled with pines and rocks, 
tumbling fresh from the mountains, so soon, 
alas! to commence its career of usefulness. At 
first, a cloud hung between us and the summit, 
but it was soon blown away. As we gathered 
the raspberries, which grew abundantly by the 
roadside, we fancied that that action was con- 
sistent with a lofty prudence, as if the traveller 
who ascends into a mountainous region should 
fortify himself by eating of such light ambrosial 







C<3 



A WALK TO WACHUSETT 81 

fruits as grow there; and, drinking of the 
springs which gush out from the mountain sides, 
as he gradually inhales the subtler and purer 
atmosphere of those elevated places, thus pro- 
pitiating the mountain gods, by a sacrifice of 
their own fruits. The gross products of the 
plains and valleys are for such as dwell therein; 
but it seemed to us that the juices of this berry 
had relation to the thin air of the mountain-tops. 
In due time we began to ascend the mountain, 
passing, first, through a grand sugar-maple 
wood, which bore the marks of the auger, then a 
denser forest, which gradually became dwarfed, 
till there were no trees whatever. We at length 
pitched our tent on the summit. It is but 
nineteen hundred feet above the village of 
Princeton, and three thousand above the level of 
the sea ; but by this slight elevation it is infinitely 
removed from the plain, and when we reached it, 
we felt a sense of remoteness, as if we had trav- 
elled into distant regions, to Arabia Petrea, or 
the farthest east. A robin upon a staff, was the 
highest object in sight. Swallows were flying 
about us, and the cheewink and cuckoo were 
heard near at hand. The summit consists of a 
few acres, destitute of trees, covered with bare 
rocks, interpersed with blueberry bushes, rasp- 
berries, gooseberries, strawberries, moss, and a 
fine wiry grass. The common yellow lily, and 
dwarf-cornel, grow abundantly in the crevices of 



82 EXCURSIONS 

the rocks. This clear space, which is gently 
rounded, is bounded a few feet lower by a thick 
shrubbery of oaks, with maples, aspens, beeches, 
cherries, and occasionally a mountain-ash inter- 
mingled, among which we found the bright blue 
berries of the Solomon's Seal, and the fruit of 
the pyrola. From the foundation of a wooden 
observatory, which was formerly erected on the 
highest point, forming a rude, hollow structure 
of stone, a dozen feet in diameter, and five or six 
in height, we could see Monadnock, in simple 
grandeur, in the northwest, rising nearly a thou- 
sand feet higher, still the "far blue mountain,' ' 
though with an altered profile. The first day the 
weather was so hazy that it was in vain we en- 
deavored to unravel the obscurity. It was like 
looking into the sky again, and the patches of 
forest here and there seemed to flit like clouds 
over a lower heaven. As to voyagers of an aerial 
Polynesia, the earth seemed like a larger island 
in the ether; on every side, even as low as we, 
the sky shutting down, like an unfathomable 
deep, around it, a blue Pacific island, where who 
knows what islanders inhabit? and as we sail 
near its shores we see the waving of trees, and 
hear the lowing of kine. 

We read Virgil and Wordsworth in our tent, 
with new pleasure there, while waiting for a 
clearer atmosphere, nor did the weather prevent 



A WALK TO WACHUSETT 83 

our appreciating the simple truth and beauty of 
Peter Bell:— 

"And he had lain beside his asses, 
On lofty Cheviot hills." 

"And he had trudged through Yorkshire dales, 
Among the rocks and winding scars, 
Where deep and low the hamlets lie 
Beneath their little patch of sky, 
And little lot of stars." 

Who knows but this hill may one day be a 
Helvellyn, or even a Parnassus, and the Muses 
haunt here, and other Homers frequent the 
neighboring plains. 

Not unconcerned Wachusett rears his head 
Above the field, so late from nature won, 

With patient brow reserved, as one who read 
New annals in the history of man. 

The blueberries which the mountain afforded, 
added to the milk we had brought, made our 
frugal supper, while for entertainment the even- 
song of the wood-thrush rung along the ridge. 
Our eyes rested on no painted ceiling nor car- 
peted hall, but on skies of nature's painting, and 
hills and forests of her embroiderv. Before sun- 

a/ 

set, we rambled along the ridge to the north, 
while a hawk soared still above us. It was a 
place where gods might wander, so solemn and 
solitary, and removed from all contagion with 
the plain. As the evening came on, the haze 



84 EXCURSIONS 

was condensed in vapor, and the landscape be- 
came more distinctly visible, and numerous 
sheets of water were brought to light. 

Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant, 
Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae. 

And now the tops of the villas smoke afar off, 

And the shadows fall longer from the high mountains. 

As we* stood on the stone tower while the sun 
was setting, we saw the shades of night creep 
gradually over the valleys of the east, and the 
inhabitants went into their houses, and shut their 
doors, while the moon silently rose up, and took 
possession of that part. And then the same 
scene was repeated on the west side, as far as 
the Connecticut and the Green Mountains, and 
the sun's rays fell on us two alone, of all New 
England men. 

It was the night but one before the full of the 
moon, so bright that we could see to read dis- 
tinctly by moonlight, and in the evening strolled 
over the summit without danger. There was, by 
chance, a fire blazing on Monadnock that night, 
which lighted up the whole western horizon, and 
by making us aware of a community of moun- 
tains, made our position seem less solitary. But 
at length the wind drove us to the shelter of our 
tent, and we closed its door for the night, and 
fell asleep. 

It was thrilling to hear the wind roar over the 







^3 



5J 
-Si 



A WALK TO WACHUSETT 85 

rocks, at intervals when we waked, for it had 
grown quite cold and windy. The night was in 
its elements, simple even to majesty in that 
bleak place, — a bright moonlight and a piercing 
wind. It was at no time darker than twilight 
within the tent, and we could easily see the moon 
through its transparent roof as we lay ; for there 
was the moon still above us, with Jupiter and 
Saturn on either hand, looking down on Wachu- 
sett, and it was a satisfaction to know that they 
were our fellow-travellers still, as high and out 
of our reach as our own destiny. Truly the 
stars were given for a consolation to man. We 
should not know but our life were fated to be 
always grovelling, but it is permitted to behold 
them, and surely they are deserving of a fair 
destiny. We see laws which never fail, of whose 
failure we never conceived ; and their lamps burn 
all the night, too, as well as all day, — so rich and 
lavish is that nature which can afford this super- 
fluity of light. 

The morning twilight began as soon as the 
moon had set, and we arose and kindled our fire, 
whose blaze might have been seen for thirty miles 
around. As the daylight increased, it was re- 
markable how rapidly the wind went down. 
There was no dew on the summit, but coldness 
supplied its place. When the dawn had reached 
its prime, we enjoyed the view of a distinct 
horizon line, and could fancy ourselves at sea, 



86 EXCURSIONS 

and the distant hills the waves in the horizon, 
as seen from the deck of a vessel. The cherry- 
birds flitted around us, the nuthatch and flicker 
were heard among the bushes, the titmouse 
perched within a few feet, and the song of the 
wood-thrush again rung along the ridge. At 
length we saw the sun rise up out of the sea, and 
shine on Massachusetts; and from this moment 
the atmosphere grew more and more transparent 
till the time of our departure, and we began to 
realize the extent of the view, and how the earth, 
in some degree, answered to the heavens in 
breadth, the white villages to the constellations 
in the sky. There was little of the sublimity 
and grandeur which belong to mountain scenery, 
but an immense landscape to ponder on a sum- 
mer's day. We could see how ample and roomy 
is nature. As far as the eye could reach, there 
was little life in the landscape; the few birds 
that flitted past did not crowd. The travellers 
on the remote highways, which intersect the 
country on every side, had no fellow-travellers 
for miles, before or behind. On every side, the 
eye ranged over successive circles of towns, 
rising one above another, like the terraces of a 
vineyard, till they were lost in the horizon. 
Wachusett is, in fact, the observatory of the 
State. There lay Massachusetts, spread out be- 
fore us in its length and breadth, like a map. 
There was the level horizon, which told of the 



A WALK TO WACHUSETT 87 

sea on the east and south, the well-known hills 
of New Hampshire on the north, and the misty 
summits of the Hoosac and Green Mountains, 
first made visible to us the evening before, blue 
and unsubstantial, like some bank of clouds, 
which the morning wind would dissipate, on 
the northwest and west. These last distant 
ranges, on which the eye rests unwearied, com- 
mence with an abrupt boulder in the north, be- 
yond the Connecticut, and travel southward, 
with three or four peaks dimly seen. But 
Monadnock, rearing its masculine front in the 
northwest, is the grandest feature. As we be- 
held it, we knew that it was the height of land 
between the two rivers, on this side the valley 
of the Merrimack, or that of the Connecticut, 
fluctuating with their blue seas of air, — these 
rival vales, already teeming with Yankee men 
along their respective streams, born to what 
destiny who shall tell? Watatic, and the neigh- 
boring hills in this State and in New Hampshire, 
are a continuation of the same elevated range on 
which we were standing. But that New Hamp- 
shire bluff, — that promontory of a State, — lower- 
ing day and night on this our State of Massa- 
chusetts, will longest haunt our dreams. 

We could, at length, realize the place moun- 
tains occupy on the land, and how they come into 
the general scheme of the universe. When first 
we climb their summits and observe their lesser 



88 EXCURSIONS 

irregularities, we do not give credit to the com- 
prehensive intelligence which shaped them; but 
when afterward we behold their outlines in the 
horizon, we confess that the hand which moulded 
their opposite slopes, making one to balance the 
other, worked round a deep centre, and was 
privy to the plan of the universe. So is the least 
part of nature in its bearings referred to all 
space. These lesser mountain ranges, as well as 
the Alleghanies, run from northeast to south- 
west, and parallel with these mountain streams 
are the more fluent rivers, answering to the gen- 
eral direction of the coast, the bank of the great 
ocean stream itself. Even the clouds, with their 
thin bars, fall into the same direction by prefer- 
ence, and such even is the course of the prevail- 
ing winds, and the migration of men and birds. 
A mountain-chain determines many things for 
the statesman and philosopher. The improve- 
ments of civilization rather creep along its sides 
than cross its summit. How often is it a barrier 
to prejudice and fanaticism? In passing over 
these heights of land, through their thin atmos- 
phere, the follies of the plain are refined and 
purified; and as many species of plants do not 
scale their summits, so many species of folly no 
doubt do not cross the Alleghanies ; it is only the 
hardy mountain plant that creeps quite over the 
ridge, and descends into the valley beyond. 
We get a dim notion of the flight of birds, es- 



A WALK TO WACHUSETT 89 

pecially of such as fly high in the air, by having 
ascended a mountain. We can now see what 
landmarks mountains are to their migrations; 
how the Catskills and Highlands have hardly 
sunk to them, when Wachusett and Monadnock 
open a passage to the northeast; how they are 
guided, too, in their course by the rivers and 
valleys ; and who knows but by the stars, as well 
as the mountain ranges, and not by the petty 
landmarks which we use. The bird whose eye 
takes in the Green Mountains on the one side, 
and the ocean on the other, need not be at a loss 
to find its way. 

At noon we descended the mountain, and hav- 
ing returned to the abodes of men, turned our 
faces to the east again; measuring our progress, 
from time to time, by the more ethereal hues 
which the mountain assumed. Passing swiftly 
through Stillwater and Sterling, as with a down- 
ward impetus, we found ourselves almost at 
home again in the green meadows of Lancaster, 
so like our own Concord, for both are watered by 
two streams which unite near their centres, and 
have many other features in common. There is 
an unexpected refinement about this scenery: 
level prairies of great extent, interspersed with 
elms and hop-fields and groves of trees, give it 
almost a classic appearance. This, it will be re- 
membered, was the scene of Mrs. Rowlandson's 
capture, and of other events in the Indian wars, 



90 EXCURSIONS 

but from this July afternoon, and under that 
mild exterior, those times seemed as remote as 
the irruption of the Goths. They were the dark 
age of New England. On beholding a picture 
of a New England village as it then appeared, 
with a fair open prospect, and a light on trees 
and river, as if it were broad noon, we find we 
had not thought the sun shone in those days, or 
that men lived in broad daylight then. We do 
not imagine the sun shining on hill and valley 
during Philip's war, nor on the war-path of 
Paugus, or Standish, or Church, or Lovell, with 
serene summer weather, but a dim twilight or 
night did those events transpire in. They must 
have fought in the shade of their own dusky 
deeds. 

At length, as we plodded along the dusty 
roads, our thoughts became as dusty as they; all 
thought indeed stopped, thinking broke down, or 
proceeded only passively in a sort of rhythmical 
cadence of the confused material of thought, and 
we found ourselves mechanically repeating some 
familiar measure which timed with our tread; 
some verse of the Robin Hood ballads, for in- 
stance, which one can recommend to travel by. 

"Swearers are swift, sayd lyttle John, 
As the wind blows over the hill; 
For if it be never so loud this night, 
To-morrow it may be still." 




55 









A WALK TO WACHUSETT 91 

And so it went up hill and down till a stone inter- 
rupted the line, when a new verse was chosen. 

"His shoote it was but loosely shot, 
Yet flewe not the arrowe in vaine, 
For it met one of the Sheriffe's men, 
And William-a-Trent was slaine." 

There is, however, this consolation to the most 
way-worn traveller, upon the dustiest road, that 
the path his feet describe is so perfectly symbol- 
ical of human life, — now climbing the hills, now 
descending into the vales. From the summits he 
beholds the heavens and the horizon, from the 
vales he looks up to the heights again. He is 
treading his old lessons still, and though he may 
be very weary and travel-worn, it is yet sincere 
experience. 

Leaving the Nashua, we changed our route a 
little, and arrived at Stillriver Village, in the 
western part of Harvard, just as the sun was set- 
ting. From this place, which lies to the north- 
ward, upon the western slope of the same range 
of hills on which we had spent the noon before, 
in the adjacent town, the prospect is beautiful, 
and the grandeur of the mountain outlines unsur- 
passed. There was such a repose and quiet here 
at this hour, as if the very hill-sides were enjoy- 
ing the scene, and we passed slowly along, 
looking back over the country we had traversed, 
and listening to the evening song of the robin, 
we could not help contrasting the equanimity 



92 EXCURSIONS 

of nature with the bustle and impatience of man. 
His words and actions presume always a crisis 
near at hand, but she is forever silent and un- 
pretending. 

And now that we have returned to the desul- 
tory life of the plain, let us endeavor to import a 
little of that mountain grandeur into it. We will 
remember within what walls we lie, and under- 
stand that this level life too has its summit, and 
why from the mountain-top the deepest valleys 
have a tinge of blue; that there is elevation in 
every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that 
the heavens may not be seen from, and we have 
only to stand on the summit of our hour to com- 
mand an uninterrupted horizon. 

We rested that night at Harvard, and the next 
morning, while one bent his steps to the nearer 
village of Groton, the other took his separate and 
solitary way to the peaceful meadows of Con- 
cord; but let him not forget to record the brave 
hospitality of a farmer and his wife, who gener- 
ously entertained him at their board, though the 
poor wayfarer could only congratulate the one 
on the continuance of hay-weather, and silently 
accept the kindness of the other. Refreshed by 
this instance of generosity, no less than by the 
substantial viands set before him, he pushed 
forward with new vigor, and reached the banks 
of the Concord before the sun had climbed many 
degrees into the heavens. 



THE LANDLORD 

[ 1843 ] 

UNDER the one word, house, are included 
the school-house, the alms-house, the jail, 
the tavern, the dwelling-house; and the 
meanest shed or cave in which men live contains 
the elements of all these. But nowhere on the 
earth stands the entire and perfect house. The 
Parthenon, St. Peter's, the Gothic minster, the 
palace, the hovel, are but imperfect executions of 
an imperfect idea. Who would dwell in them? 
Perhaps to the eye of the gods, the cottage is 
more holy than the Parthenon, for they look 
down with no especial favor upon the shrines 
formally dedicated to them, and that should be 
the most sacred roof which shelters most of hu- 
manity. Surely, then, the gods who are most in- 
terested in the human race preside over the 
Tavern, where especially men congregate. Me- 
thinks I see the thousand shrines erected to Hos- 
pitality shining afar in all countries, as well Ma- 
hometan and Jewish, as Christian, khans, and 
caravansaries, and inns, whither all pilgrims with- 
out distinction resort. 

Likewise we look in vain, east or west over the 

93 



94 EXCURSIONS 

earth, to find the perfect man; but each repre- 
sents only some particular excellence. The 
Landlord is a man of more open and general 
sympathies, who possesses a spirit of hospitality 
which is its own reward, and feeds and shelters 
men from pure love of the creatures. To be sure, 
this profession is as often filled by imperfect 
characters, and such as have sought it from un- 
worthy motives, as any other, but so much the 
more should we prize the true and honest Land- 
lord when we meet with him. 

Who has not imagined to himself a country 
inn, where the traveller shall really feel in, and 
at home, and at his public-house, who was before 
at his private house ; whose host is indeed a host, 
and a lord of the land, a self-appointed brother 
of his race ; called to his place, besides, by all the 
winds of heaven and his good genius, as truly as 
the preacher is called to preach; a man of such 
universal sympathies, and so broad and genial a 
human nature, that he would fain sacrifice the 
tender but narrow ties of private friendship, to a 
broad, sunshiny fair-weather-and-foul friend- 
ship for his race, who loves men, not as a phi- 
losopher, with philanthropy, nor as an overseer 
of the poor, with charity, but by a necessity of his 
nature, as he loves dogs and horses ; and standing 
at his open door from morning till night, would 
fain see more and more of them come along the 
highway, and is never satiated. To him the sun 



THE LANDLORD 95 

and moon are but travellers, the one by day and 
the other by night; and they too patronize his 
house. To his imagination all things travel save 
his sign-post and himself; and though you may 
be his neighbor for years, he will show you only 
the civilities of the road. But on the other hand, 
while nations and individuals are alike selfish and 
exclusive, he loves all men equally; and if he 
treats his nearest neighbor as a stranger, since he 
has invited all nations to share his hospitality, 
the farthest travelled is in some measure kindred 
to him who takes him into the bosom of his 
family. 

He keeps a house of entertainment at the sign 
of the Black Horse or the Spread Eagle, and is 
known far and wide, and his fame travels with 
increasing radius every year. All the neighbor- 
hood is in his interest, and if the traveller ask 
how far to a tavern, he receives some such 
answer as this: "Well, sir, there's a house about 
three miles from here, where they haven't taken 
down their sign yet; but it's only ten miles to 
Slocum's, and that's a capital house both for 
man and beast." At three miles he passes a 
cheerless barrack, standing desolate behind its 
sign-post, neither public nor private, and has 
glimpses of a discontented couple who have mis- 
taken their calling. At ten miles see where the 
Tavern stands, — really an entertaining prospect, 
— so public and inviting that only the rain and 



96 EXCURSIONS 

snow do not enter. It is no gay pavilion, made 
of bright stuffs, and furnished with nuts and 
gingerbread, but as plain and sincere as a cara- 
vansary; located in no Tarrytown, w T here you re- 
ceive only the civilities of commerce, but far in 
the fields it exercises a primitive hospitality, amid 
the fresh scent of new hay and raspberries, if it 
be summer time, and the tinkling of cow-bells 
from invisible pastures; for it is a land flowing 
with milk and honey, and the newest milk courses 
in a broad, deep stream across the premises. 

In these retired places the tavern is first of all 
a house — elsewhere, last of all, or never, — and 
warms and shelters its inhabitants. It is as sim- 
ple and sincere in its essentials as the caves in 
which the first men dwelt, but it is also as open 
and public. The traveller steps across the 
threshold, and lo! he too is master, for he only 
can be called proprietor of the house here who 
behaves with most propriety in it. The Land- 
lord stands clear back in nature, to my imagina- 
tion, with his axe and spade felling trees and 
raising potatoes with the vigor of a pioneer ; with 
Promethean energy making nature .yield her in- 
crease to supply the wants of so many; and he 
is not so exhausted, nor of so short a stride, but 
that he comes forward even to the highway to 
this wide hospitality and publicity. Surely, he 
has solved some of the problems of life. He 
comes in at his backdoor, holding a log fresh cut 



THE LANDLORD 97 

for the hearth upon his shoulder with one hand, 
while he greets the newly arrived traveller with 
the other. 

Here at length we have free range, as not in 
palaces, nor cottages, nor temples, and intrude 
nowhere. All the secrets of housekeeping are 
exhibited to the eyes of men, above and below, 
before and behind. This is the necessary way to 
live, men have confessed, in these days, and 
shall he skulk and hide? And why should we 
have any serious disgust at kitchens? Perhaps 
they are the holiest recess of the house. There 
is the hearth, after all, — and the settle, and the 
fagots, and the kettle, and the crickets. We have 
pleasant reminiscences of these. They are the 
heart, the left ventricle, the very vital part of 
the house. Here the real and sincere life which 
we meet in the streets was actually fed and 
sheltered. Here burns the taper that cheers the 
lonely traveller by night, and from this hearth 
ascend the smokes that populate the valley to his 
eyes by day. On the whole, a man may not be 
so little ashamed of any other part of his house, 
for here is his sincerity and earnest, at least. It 
may not be here that the besoms are plied most, 
— it is not here that they need to be, for dust 
will not settle on the kitchen floor more than 
in nature. 

Hence it will not do for the Landlord to 
possess too fine a nature. He must have health 



98 EXCURSIONS 

above the common accidents of life, subject to no 
modern fashionable diseases ; but no taste, rather 
a vast relish or appetite. His sentiments on all 
subjects will be delivered as freely as the wind 
blows; there is nothing private or individual in 
them, though still original, but they are public, 
and of the hue of the heavens over his house, — 
a certain out-of-door obviousness and trans- 
parency not to be disputed. What he does, his 
manners are not to be complained of, though 
abstractly offensive, for it is what man does, and 
in him the race is exhibited. When he eats, he is 
liver and bowels, and the whole digestive ap- 
paratus to the company, and so all admit the 
thing is done. He must have no idiosyncrasies, 
no particular bents or tendencies to this or that, 
but a general, uniform, and healthy develop- 
ment, such as his portly person indicates, offer- 
ing himself equally on all sides to men. He is 
not one of your peaked and inhospitable men of 
genius, with particular tastes, but, as we said be- 
fore, has one uniform relish, and taste which 
never aspires higher than a tavern-sign, or the 
cut of a weather-cock. The man of genius, like 
a dog with a bone, or the slave who has swal- 
lowed a diamond, or a patient with the gravel, 
sits afar and retired, off the road, hangs out no 
sign of refreshment for man and beast, but says, 
by all possible hints and signs, I wish to be alone 
— good-by — farewell. But the landlord can af- 



THE LANDLORD 99 

ford to live without privacy. He entertains no 
private thought, he cherishes no solitary hour, 
no Sabbath day, but thinks, — enough to assert 
the dignity of reason, — and talks, and reads the 
newspaper. What he does not tell to one trav- 
eller, he tells to another. He never wants to be 
alone, but sleeps, wakes, eats, drinks, socially, 
still remembering his race. He walks abroad 
through the thoughts of men, and the Iliad and 
Shakspeare are tame to him, who hears the 
rude but homely incidents of the road from 
every traveller. The mail might drive through 
his brain in the midst of his most lonely soliloquy, 
without disturbing his equanimity, provided it 
brought plenty of news and passengers. There 
can be no profanity where there is no fane be- 
hind, and the whole world may see quite round 
him. Perchance his lines have fallen to him in 
dustier places, and he has heroically sat down 
where two roads meet, or at the Four Corners, 
or the Five Points, and his life is sublimely triv- 
ial for the good of men. The dust of travel blows 
ever in his eyes, and they preserve their clear, 
complacent look. The hourlies and half-hour- 
lies, the dailies and weeklies, whirl on well-worn 
tracks, round and round his house, as if it were 
the goal in the stadium, and still he sits within 
in unruffled serenity, with no show of retreat. 
His neighbor dwells timidly behind a screen of 
poplars and willows, and a fence with sheaves 



100 EXCURSIONS 

of spears at regular intervals, or defended 
against the tender palms of visitors by sharp 
spikes, — but the traveller's wheels rattle over the 
doorstep of the tavern, and he cracks his whip 
in the entry. He is truly glad to see you, and 
sincere as the bull's-eye over his door. The trav- 
eller seeks to find, wherever he goes, some one 
who will stand in this broad and catholic rela- 
tion to him, who will be an inhabitant of the land 
to him a stranger, and represent its human nat- 
ure, as the rock stands for its inanimate nature ; 
and this is he. As his crib furnishes provender 
for the traveller's horse, and his larder pro- 
visions for his appetite, so his conversation fur- 
nishes the necessary aliment to his spirits. He 
knows very well what a man wants, for he is a 
man himself, and as it were the farthest trav- 
elled, though he has never stirred from his door. 
He understands his needs and destiny. He 
would be well fed and lodged, there can be no 
doubt, and have the transient sympathy of a 
cheerful companion, and of a heart which al- 
ways prophesies fair weather. And after all the 
greatest men, even, want much more the sym- 
pathy which every honest fellow can give, than 
that which the great only can impart. If he is 
not the most upright, let us allow him this 
praise, that he is the most downright of men. 
He has a hand to shake and to be shaken, and 
takes a sturdy and unquestionable interest in 



THE LANDLORD 101 

you, as if he had assumed the care of you, but if 
you will break your neck, he will even give you 
the best advice as to the method. 

The great poets have not been ungrateful to 
their landlords. Mine host of the Tabard Inn, 
in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, was an 
honor to his profession: — 

"A semely man our Hoste was, with alle, 
For to han been an marshal in an halle. 
A large man he was, with eyen stepe; 
A fairer burgeis is ther non in Chepe: 
Bold of his speche, and wise, and well ytaught, 
And of manhood him lacked righte naught, 
Eke thereto, was he right a mery man, 
And after souper plaien he began, 
And spake of mirthe amonges other thinges, 
Whan that we hadden made our reckoninges." 

He is the true house-band, and centre of the com- 
pany — of greater fellowship and practical social 
talent than any. He it is that proposes that each 
shall tell a tale to while away the time to Canter- 
bury, and leads them himself, and concludes with 
his own tale: — 

"Now, by my fader's soule that is ded, 
But ye be mery, smiteth of my hed: 
Hold up your hondes withouten more speche/' 

If we do not look up to the Landlord, we look 
round for him on all emergencies, for he is a man 
of infinite experience, who unites hands with wit. 
He is a more public character than a statesman, 



102 EXCURSIONS 

— a publican, and not consequently a sinner ; and 
surely, he, if any, should be exempted from taxa- 
tion and military duty. 

Talking with our host is next best and instruc- 
tive to talking with one's self. It is a more con- 
scious soliloquy; as it were, to speak generally, 
and try what we would say provided we had an 
audience. He has indulgent and open ears, and 
does not require petty and particular statements. 
"Heigho!" exclaims the traveller. Them's my 
sentiments, thinks mine host, and stands ready 
for what may come next, expressing the purest 
sympathy by his demeanor. "Hot as blazes!" 
says the other, — "Hard weather, sir, — not much 
stirring nowadays," says he. He is wiser than to 
contradict his guest in any case; he lets him go 
on, he lets him travel. 

The latest sitter leaves him standing far in the 
night, prepared to live right on, while suns rise 
and set, and his "good night" has as brisk a 
sound as his "good morning;" and the earliest 
riser finds him tasting his liquors in the bar ere 
flies begin to buzz, with a countenance fresh as 
the morning star, over the sanded floor, — and 
not as one who had watched all night for trav- 
ellers. And yet, if beds be the subject of con- 
versation, it will appear that no man has been a 
sounder sleeper in his time. 

Finally, as for his moral character, we do not 
hesitate to say, that he has no grain of vice or 



THE LANDLORD 103 

meanness in him, but represents just that degree 
of virtue which all men relish without being 
obliged to respect. He is a good man, as his 
bitters are good, — an unquestionable goodness. 
Not what is called a good man, — good to be con- 
sidered, as a work of art in galleries and mu- 
seums, — but a good fellow, that is, good to be 
associated with. Who ever thought of the re- 
ligion of an innkeeper — whether he was joined 
to the Church, partook of the sacrament, said his 
prayers, feared God, or the like? No doubt he 
has had his experiences, has felt a change, and 
is a firm believer in the perseverance of the saints. 
In this last, we suspect, does the peculiarity of 
his religion consist. But he keeps an inn, and 
not a conscience. How many fragrant charities 
and sincere social virtues are implied in this daily 
offering of himself to the public. He cherishes 
good will to all, and gives the wayfarer as good 
and honest advice to direct him on his road as 
the priest. 

To conclude, the tavern will compare favor- 
ably with the church. The church is the place 
where prayers and sermons are delivered, but 
the tavern is where they are to take effect, and 
if the former are good, the latter cannot be bad. 



A WINTER WALK 

[ 1843 ] 

THE wind has gently murmured through 
the blinds, or puffed with feathery soft- 
ness against the windows, and occasionally 
sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves 
along, the live-long night. The meadow-mouse 
has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl 
has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the 
swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have 
all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet 
on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in 
their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were 
its first, not its last sleep, save when some street- 
sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked 
upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her 
midnight work, — the only sound awake twixt 
Venus and Mars, — advertising us of a remote in- 
ward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowships 
where gods are met together, but where it is very 
bleak for men to stand. But while the earth 
has slumbered, all the air has been alive with 
feathery flakes descending, as if some northern 
Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over 
all the fields. 

104 



A WINTER WALK 105 

We sleep, and at length awake to the still real- 
ity of a winter morning. The snow lies warm 
as cotton or down upon the window-sill; the 
broadened sash and frosted panes admit a dim 
and private light, which enhances the snug cheer 
within. The stillness of the morning is im- 
pressive. The floor creaks under our feet as we 
move toward the window to look abroad through 
some clear space over the fields. We see the 
roofs stand under their snow burden. From the 
eaves and fences hang stalactites of snow, and 
in the yard stand stalagmites covering some con- 
cealed core. The trees and shrubs rear white 
arms to the sky on every side; and where were 
walls and fences, we see fantastic forms stretch- 
ing in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, 
as if nature had strewn her fresh designs over the 
fields by night as models for man's art. 

Silently we unlatch the door, letting the drift 
fall in, and step abroad to face the cutting air. 
Already the stars have lost some of their sparkle, 
and a dull, leaden mist skirts the horizon. A lurid 
brazen light in the east proclaims the approach 
of day, while the western landscape is dim and 
spectral still, and clothed in a sombre Tartarian 
light, like the shadowy realms. They are In- 
fernal sounds only that you hear, — the crowing 
of cocks, the barking of dogs, the chopping of 
wood, the lowing of kine, all seem to come from 
Pluto's barn-yard and beyond the Styx: — not 



106 EXCURSIONS 

for any melancholy they suggest, but their twi- 
light bustle is too solemn and mysterious for 
earth. The recent tracks of the fox or otter, in 
the yard, remind us that each hour of the night 
is crowded with events, and the primeval nature 
is still working and making tracks in the snow. 
Opening the gate, we tread briskly along the 
lone country road, crunching the dry and crisped 
snow under our feet, or aroused by the sharp 
clear creak of the wood-sled, just starting for 
the distant market, from the early farmer's door, 
where it has lain the summer long, dreaming 
amid the chips and stubble; while far through 
the drifts and powdered windows we see the 
farmer's early candle, like a paled star, emitting 
a lonely beam, as if some severe virtue were at 
its matins there. And one by one the smokes 
begin to ascend from the chimneys amidst the 
trees and snows. 

The sluggish smoke curls up from some deep dell, 
The stiffened air exploring in the dawn, 
And making slow acquaintance with the day; 
Delaying now upon its heavenward course, 
In wreathed loiterings dallying with itself, 
With as uncertain purpose and slow deed, 
As its half-wakened master by the hearth, 
Whose mind still slumbering and sluggish thoughts 
Have not yet swept into the onward current 
Of the new day; — and now its streams afar, 
The while the chopper goes with step direct, 
And mind intent to swing the early axe. 







"M 



A WINTER WALK 107 

First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad 
His early scout, his emissary, smoke, 
The earliest, latest pilgrim from the roof, 
To feel the frosty air, inform the day ; 
And while he crouches still beside the hearth, 
Nor musters courage to unbar the door, 
It has gone down the glen with the light wind, 
And o'er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath, 
Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill, 
And warmed the pinions of the early bird; 
And now, perchance, high in the crispy air, 
Has caught sight of the day o'er the earth's edge, 
And greets its master's eye at his low door, 
As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky. 

We hear the sound of wood-chopping at the 
farmers' doors, far over the frozen earth, the 
baying of the house-dog, and the distant clarion 
of the cock. Though the thin and frosty air con- 
veys only the finer particles of sound to our ears, 
with short and sweet vibrations, as the waves 
subside soonest on the purest and lightest liquids, 
in which gross substances sink to the bottom. 
They come clear and bell-like, and from a 
greater distance in the horizon, as if there were 
fewer impediments than in summer to make 
them faint and ragged. The ground is sonorous, 
like seasoned wood, and even the ordinary rural 
sounds are melodious, and the jingling of the 
ice on the trees is sweet and liquid. There is the 
least possible moisture in the atmosphere, all 
being dried up, or congealed, and it is of such 



108 EXCURSIONS 

extreme tenuity and elasticity, that it becomes a 
source of delight. The withdrawn and tense sky 
seems groined like the aisles of a cathedral, and 
the polished air sparkles as if there were crystals 
of ice floating in it. As they who had resided in 
Greenland tell us, that, when it freezes, "the sea 
smokes like burning turf-land, and a fog or mist 
arises, called frost-smoke," which "cutting smoke 
frequently raises blisters on the face and hands, 
and is very pernicious to the health." But this 
pure stinging cold is an elixir to the lungs, and 
not so much a frozen mist, as a crystallized mid- 
summer haze, refined and purified by cold. 

The sun at length rises through the distant 
woods, as if with the faint clashing swinging 
sound of cymbals, melting the air with his beams, 
and with such rapid steps the morning travels, 
that already his rays are gilding the distant 
western mountains. Meanwhile we step hastily 
along through the powdery snow, warmed by an 
inward heat, enjoying an Indian summer still, in 
the increased glow of thought and feeling. Prob- 
ably if our lives were more conformed to nature, 
we should not need to defend ourselves against 
her heats and colds, but find her our constant 
nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds. 
If our bodies were fed with pure and simple 
elements, and not with a stimulating and heat- 
ing diet, they would afford no more pasture for 
cold than a leafless twig, but thrive like the 



A WINTER WALK 109 

trees, which find even winter genial to their ex- 
pansion. 

The wonderful purity of nature at this season 
is a most pleasing fact. Every decayed stump 
and moss-grown stone and rail, and the dead 
leaves of autumn, are concealed by a clean nap- 
kin of snow. In the bare fields and tinkling 
woods, see what virtue survives. In the coldest 
and bleakest places, the warmest charities still 
maintain a foothold. A cold and searching wind 
drives away all contagion, and nothing can with- 
stand it but what has a virtue in it; and accord- 
ingly, whatever we meet with in cold and bleak 
places, as the tops of mountains, we respect for 
a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan tough- 
ness. All things beside seem to be called in for 
shelter, and what stays out must be part of the 
original frame of the universe, and of such valor 
as God himself. It is invigorating to breathe the 
cleansed air. Its greater fineness and purity 
are visible to the eye, and we would fain stay 
out long and late, that the gales may sigh 
through us, too, as through the leafless trees, and 
fit us for the winter: — as if we hoped so to bor- 
row some pure and steadfast virtue, which will 
stead us in all seasons. 

There is a slumbering subterranean fire in 
nature which never goes out, and which no cold 
can chill. It finally melts the great snow, and 
in January or July is only buried under a 



110 EXCURSIONS 

thicker or thinner covering. In the coldest day 
it flows somewhere, and the snow melts around 
every tree. This field of winter rye, which 
sprouted late in the fall, and now speedily dis- 
solves the snow, is where the fire is very thinly 
covered. We feel warmed by it. In the winter, 
warmth stands for all virtue, and we resort in 
thought to a trickling rill, with its bare stones 
shining in the sun, and to warm springs in the 
woods, with as much eagerness as rabbits and 
robins. The steam which rises from swamps and 
pools, is as dear and domestic as that of our own 
kettle. What fire could ever equal the sunshine 
of a winter's day, when the meadow mice come 
out by the wallsides, and the chicadee lisps in the 
defiles of the wood? The warmth comes directly 
from the sun, and is not radiated from the earth, 
as in summer ; and when we feel his beams on our 
backs as we are treading some snowy dell, we 
are grateful as for a special kindness, and bless 
the sun which has followed us into that by- 
place. 

This subterranean fire has its altar in each 
man's breast, for in the coldest day, and on the 
bleakest hill, the traveller cherishes a warmer 
fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled 
on any hearth. A healthy man, indeed, is the 
complement of the seasons, and in winter, sum- 
mer is in his heart. There is the south. Thither 
have all birds and insects migrated, and round 



A WINTER WALK 111 

the warm springs in his breast are gathered the 
robin and the lark. 

At length, having reached the edge of the 
woods, and shut out the gadding town, we enter 
within their covert as we go under the roof of 
a cottage, and cross its threshold, all ceiled and 
banked up with snow. They are glad and warm 
still, and as genial and cheery in winter as in 
summer. As we stand in the midst of the pines, 
in the flickering and checkered light which strag- 
gles but little way into their maze, we wonder if 
the towns have ever heard their simple story. It 
seems to us that no traveller has ever explored 
them, and notwithstanding the wonders which 
science is elsewhere revealing every day, who 
would not like to hear their annals? Our humble 
villages in the plain are their contribution. We 
borrow from the forest the boards which shelter, 
and the sticks which warm us. How important 
is their evergreen to the winter, that portion of 
the summer which does not fade, the permanent 
year, the un withered grass. Thus simply, and 
with little expense of altitude, is the surface of 
the earth diversified. What would human life 
be without forests, those natural cities ? From the 
tops of mountains they appear like smooth 
shaven lawns, yet whither shall we walk but in 
this taller grass ? 

In this glade covered with bushes of a year's 
growth, see how the silvery dust lies on eveiy 



112 EXCURSIONS 

seared leaf and twig, deposited in such infinite 
and luxurious forms as by their very variety 
atone for the absence of color. Observe the tiny 
tracks of mice around every stem, and the tri- 
angular tracks of the rabbit. A pure elastic 
heaven hangs over all, as if the impurities of the 
summer sky, refined and shrunk by the chaste 
winter's cold, had been winnowed from the 
heavens upon the earth. 

Nature confounds her summer distinctions at 
this season. The heavens seem to be nearer the 
earth. The elements are less reserved and dis- 
tinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The 
day is but a Scandinavian night. The winter 
is an arctic summer. 

How much more living is the life that is in 
nature, the furred life which still survives the 
stinging nights, and, from amidst fields and 
woods covered with frost and snow, sees the sun 
rise. 

"The foodless wilds 
Pour forth their brown inhabitants." 

The gray squirrel and rabbit are brisk and play- 
ful in the remote glens, even on the morning of 
the cold Friday. Here is our Lapland and Lab- 
rador, and for our Esquimaux and Knistenaux, 
Dog-ribbed Indians, Novazemblaites, and Spitz- 
bergeners, are there not the ice-cutter and wood- 
chopper, the fox, musk-rat, and mink? 



. 




The edge of the woods 



A WINTER WALK 113 

Still, in the midst of the arctic day, we may 
trace the summer to its retreats, and sympathize 
with some contemporary life. Stretched over the 
brooks, in the midst of the frost-bound meadows, 
we may observe the submarine cottages of the 
caddice-worms, the larvae of the Plicipennes. 
Their small cylindrical cases built around them- 
selves, composed of flags, sticks, grass, and 
withered leaves, shells, and pebbles, in form and 
color like the wrecks which strew the bottom, — 
now drifting along over the pebbly bottom, 
now whirling in tiny eddies and dashing down 
steep falls, or sweeping rapidly along with the 
current, or else swaying to and fro at the end 
of some grass-blade or root. Anon they will 
leave their sunken habitations, and, crawling up 
the stems of plants, or to the surface, like gnats, 
as perfect insects henceforth, flutter over the 
surface of the water, or sacrifice their short lives 
in the flame of our candles at evening. Down 
yonder little glen the shrubs are drooping under 
their burden, and the red alder-berries contrast 
with the white ground. Here are the marks of 
a myriad feet which have already been abroad. 
The sun rises as proudly over such a glen, as 
over the valley of the Seine or the Tiber, and it 
seems the residence of a pure and self-subsistent 
valor, such as they never witnessed ; which never 
knew defeat nor fear. Here reign the simplicity 
and purity of a primitive age, and a health and 



114 EXCURSIONS 

hope far remote from towns and cities. Standing 
quite alone, far in the forest, while the wind is 
shaking down snow from the trees, and leaving 
the only human tracks behind us, we find our 
reflections of a richer variety than the life of 
cities. The chicadee and nuthatch are more in- 
spiring society than statesmen and philosophers, 
and we shall return to these last, as to more vul- 
gar companions. In this lonely glen, with its 
brook draining the slopes, its creased ice and 
crystals of all hues, where the spruces and hem- 
locks stand up on either side, and the rush and 
sere wild oats in the rivulet itself, our lives are 
more serene and worthy to contemplate. 

As the day advances, the heat of the sun is re- 
flected by the hill-sides, and we hear a faint but 
sweet music, where flows the rill released from 
its fetters, and the icicles are melting on the 
trees; and the nuthatch and partridge are heard 
and seen. The south wind melts the snow at 
noon, and the bare ground appears with its 
withered grass and leaves, and we are invig- 
orated by the perfume which exhales from it, as 
by the scent of strong meats. 

Let us go into this deserted woodman's hut, 
and see how he has passed the long winter 
nights and the short and stormy days. For here 
man has lived under this south hill-side, and it 
seems a civilized and public spot. We have such 
associations as when the traveller stands by the 



A WINTER WALK 115 

ruins of Palmyra or Hecatompolis. Singing 
birds and flowers perchance have begun to ap- 
pear here, for flowers as well as weeds follow in 
the footsteps of man. These hemlocks whis- 
pered over his head, these hickory logs were his 
fuel, and these pitch-pine roots kindled his fire; 
yonder fuming rill in the hollow, whose thin and 
airy vapor still ascends as busily as ever, though 
he is far off now, was his well. These hemlock 
boughs, and the straw upon this raised platform, 
were his bed, and this broken dish held his drink. 
But he has not been here this season, for the 
phcebes built their nest upon this shelf last sum- 
mer. I find some embers left, as if he had but just 
gone out, where he baked his pot of beans; and 
while at evening he smoked his pipe, whose stem- 
less bowl lies in the ashes, chatted with his only 
companion, if perchance he had any, about the 
depth of the snow on the morrow, already falling 
fast and thick without, or disputed whether the 
last sound was the screech of an owl, or the creak 
of a bough, or imagination only; and through 
this broad chimney throat, in the late winter 
evening, ere he stretched himself upon the straw, 
he looked up to learn the progress of the storm, 
and, seeing the bright stars of Cassiopeia's chair 
shining brightly down upon him, fell content- 
edly asleep. 

See how many traces from which we may 
learn the chopper's history. From this stump 



116 EXCURSIONS 

we may guess the sharpness of his axe, and, from 
the slope of the stroke, on which side he stood, 
and whether he cut down the tree without going 
round it or changing hands; and, from the 
flexure of the splinters, we may know which way 
it fell. This one chip contains inscribed on it 
the whole history of the wood-chopper and of the 
world. On this scrap of paper, which held his 
sugar or salt, perchance, or was the wadding of 
his gun, sitting on a log in the forest, with what 
interest we read the tattle of cities, of those 
larger huts, empty and to let, like this, in High 
Streets and Broadways. The eaves are drip- 
ping on the south side of this simple roof, while 
the titmouse lisps in the pine, and the genial 
warmth of the sun around the door is somewhat 
kind and human. 

After two seasons, this rude dwelling does 
not deform the scene. Already the birds resort 
to it, to build their nests, and you may track 
to its door the feet of many quadrupeds. Thus, 
for a long time, nature overlooks the encroach- 
ment and profanity of man. The wood still 
cheerfully and unsuspiciously echoes the strokes 
of the axe that fells it, and while they are few 
and seldom, they enhance its wildness, and all 
the elements strive to naturalize the sound. 

Now our path begins to ascend gradually to 
the top of this high hill, from whose precipitous 




l ' 1 



:, 



I 






^ woodsman 



A WINTER WALK 117 

south side we can look over the broad country, of 
forest and field and river, to the distant snowy 
mountains. See yonder thin column of smoke 
curling up through the woods from some invisible 
farm-house; the standard raised over some rural 
homestead. There must be a warmer and more 
genial spot there below, as where we detect the 
vapor from a spring forming a cloud above the 
trees. What fine relations are established be- 
tween the traveller who discovers this airv col- 
umn from some eminence in the forest, and him 
who sits below. Up goes the smoke as silently 
and naturally as the vapor exhales from the 
leaves, and as busy disposing itself in wreathes 
as the housewife on the hearth below. It is a 
hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more 
intimate and important things than the boiling of 
a pot. Where its fine column rises above the 
forest, like an ensign, some human life has 
planted itself, — and such is the beginning of 
Rome, the establishment of the arts, and the 
foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of 
America, or the steppes of Asia. 

And now we descend again to the brink of 
this woodland lake, which lies in a hollow of the 
hills, as if it were their expressed juice, and that 
of the leaves, which are annually steeped in it. 
Without outlet or inlet to the eye, it has still its 
history, in the lapse of its waves, in the rounded 



118 EXCURSIONS 

pebbles on its shore, and in the pines which grow 
down to its brink. It has not been idle, though 
sedentary, but, like Abu Musa, teaches that 
"sitting still at home is the heavenly way; the 
going out is the way of the world." Yet in its 
evaporation it travels as far as any. In sum- 
mer it is the earth's liquid eye; a mirror in the 
breast of nature. The sins of the wood are 
washed out in it. See how the woods form an 
amphitheatre about it, and it is an arena for all 
the genialness of nature. All trees direct the 
traveller to its brink, all paths seek it out, birds 
fly to it, quadrupeds flee to it, and the very 
ground inclines toward it. It is nature's saloon, 
where she has sat down to her toilet. Consider 
her silent economy and tidiness; how the sun 
comes with his evaporation to sweep the dust 
from its surface each morning, and a fresh sur- 
face is constantly welling up ; and annually, after 
whatever impurities have accumulated herein, 
its liquid transparency appears again in the 
spring. In summer a hushed music seems to 
sweep across its surface. But now a plain sheet 
of snow conceals it from our eyes, except where 
the wind has swept the ice bare, and the sere 
leaves are gliding from side to side, tacking and 
veering on their tiny voyages. Here is one just 
keeled up against a pebble on shore, a dry beech- 
leaf, rocking still, as if it would start again. A 
skilful engineer, methinks, might project its 



A WINTER WALK 119 

course since it fell from the parent stem. Here 
are all the elements for such a calculation. Its 
present position, the direction of the wind, the 
level of the pond, and how much more is given. 
In its scarred edges and veins is its log rolled 
up. 

We fancy ourselves in the interior of a larger 
house. The surface of the pond is our deal 
table or sanded floor, and the woods rise abruptly 
from its edge, like the walls of a cottage. The 
lines set to catch pickerel through the ice look 
like a larger culinary preparation, and the men 
stand about on the white ground like pieces of 
forest furniture. The actions of these men, at 
the distance of half a mile over the ice and snow, 
impress us as when we read the exploits of 
Alexander in history. They seem not unworthy 
of the scenery, and as momentous as the conquest 
of kingdoms. 

Again we have wandered through the arches 
of the wood, until from its skirts we hear the dis- 
tant booming of ice from yonder bay of the river, 
as if it were moved by some other and subtler 
tide than oceans know. To me it has a strange 
sound of home, thrilling as the voice of one's dis- 
tant and noble kindred. A mild summer sun 
shines over forest and lake, and though there 
is but one green leaf for many rods, yet nature 
enjoys a serene health. Every sound is fraught 
with the same mysterious assurance of health, as 



120 EXCURSIONS 

well now the creaking of the boughs in January, 
as the soft sough of the wind in July. 

When Winter fringes every bough 

With his fantastic wreath, 
And puts the seal of silence now 

Upon the leaves beneath; 

When every stream in its pent-house 

Goes gurgling on its way, 
And in his gallery the mouse 

Nibbleth the meadow hay; 

Methinks the summer still is nigh, 

And lurketh underneath, 
As that same meadow-mouse doth lie 

Snug in that last year's heath. 

And if perchance the chicadee 

Lisp a faint note anon, 
The snow is summer's canopy, 

Which she herself put on. 

Fair blossoms deck the cheerful trees, 

And dazzling fruits depend, 
The north wind sighs a summer breeze, 

The nipping frosts to fend, 

Bringing glad tidings unto me, 

The while I stand all ear, 
Of a serene eternity, 

Which need not winter fear. 

Out on the silent pond straightway 

The restless ice doth crack, 
And pond sprites merry gambols play 

Amid the deafening rack. 




The brink of the snowbound lake 



A WINTER WALK 121 

Eager I hasten to the vale, 

As if I heard brave news, 
How nature held high festival, 

Which it were hard to lose. 

I gambol with my neighbor ice, 

And sympathizing quake, 
As each new crack darts in a trice 

Across the gladsome lake. 

One with the cricket in the ground, 

And fagot on the hearth, 
Resounds the rare domestic sound 

Along the forest path. 

Before night we will take a journey on skates 
along the course of this meandering river, as full 
of novelty to one who sits by the cottage fire all 
the winter's day, as if it were over the polar ice, 
with Captain Parry or Franklin; following the 
winding of the stream, now flowing amid hills, 
now spreading out into fair meadows, and form- 
ing a myriad coves and bays where the pine and 
hemlock overarch. The river flows in the rear of 
the towns, and we see all things from a new and 
wilder side. The fields and gardens come down 
to it with a frankness, and freedom from pre- 
tension, which they do not wear on the highway. 
It is the outside and edge of the earth. Our eyes 
are not offended by violent contrasts. The last 
rail of the farmer's fence is some swaying willow 
bough, which still preserves its freshness, and 
here at length all fences stop, and we no longer 



122 EXCURSIONS 

cross any road. We may go far up within the 
country now by the most retired and level road, 
never climbing a hill, but by broad levels ascend- 
ing to the upland meadows. It is a beautiful il- 
lustration of the law of obedience, the flow of a 
river; the path for a sick man, a highway down 
which an acorn cup may float secure with its 
freight. Its slight occasional falls, whose preci- 
pices would not diversify the landscape, are cele- 
brated by mist and spray, and attract the trav- 
eller from far and near. From the remote in- 
terior, its current conducts him by broad and 
easy steps, or by one gentle inclined plane, to the 
sea. Thus by an early and constant yielding to 
the inequalities of the ground, it secures itself the 
easiest passage. 

No domain of nature is quite closed to man at 
all times, and now we draw near to the empire of 
the fishes. Our feet glide swiftly over unfath- 
omed depths, where in summer our line tempt- 
ed the pout and perch, and where the stately 
pickerel lurked in the long corridors formed by 
the bulrushes. The deep, impenetrable marsh, 
where the heron waded, and bittern squatted, is 
made pervious to our swift shoes, as if a thou- 
sand railroads had been made into it. With one 
impulse we are carried to the cabin of the musk- 
rat, that earliest settler, and see him dart away 
under the transparent ice, like a furred fish, to 
his hole in the bank; and we glide rapidly over 



A WINTER WALK 123 

meadows where lately "the mower whet his 
scythe," through beds of frozen cranberries 
mixed with meadow grass. We skate near to 
where the blackbird, the pewee, and the king- 
bird hung their nests over the water, and the 
hornets builded from the maple in the swamp. 
How many gay warblers, following the sun, 
have radiated from this nest of silver-birch and 
thistle-down. On the swamp's outer edge was 
hung the supermarine village, where no foot 
penetrated. In this hollow tree the wood-duck 
reared her brood, and slid away each day to for- 
age in yonder fen. 

In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, 
full of dried specimens, in their natural order 
and position. The meadows and forests are a 
hortus siccus. The leaves and grasses stand per- 
fectly pressed by the air without screw or gum, 
and the birds' nests are not hung on an artificial 
twig, but where they builded them. We go about 
dryshod to inspect the summer's work in the 
rank swamp, and see what a growth have got the 
alders, the willows, and the maples ; testifying to 
how many warm suns, and fertilizing dews and 
showers. See what strides their boughs took in 
the luxuriant summer, — and anon these dormant 
buds will carry them onward and upward an- 
other span into the heavens. 

Occasionally we wade through fields of snow, 
under whose depths the river is lost for many 



124 EXCURSIONS 

rods, to appear again to the right or left, where 
we least expected ; still holding on its way under- 
neath, with a faint, stertorous, rumbling sound, 
as if, like the bear and marmot, it too had hiber- 
nated, and we had followed its faint summer- 
trail to where it earthed itself in snow and ice. 
At first we should have thought that rivers 
would be empty and dry in midwinter, or else 
frozen solid till the spring thawed them; but 
their volume is not diminished even, for only a 
superficial cold bridges their surface. The thou- 
sand springs which feed the lakes and streams are 
flowing still. The issues of a few surface springs 
only are closed, and they go to swell the deep 
reservoirs. Nature's wells are below the frost. 
The summer brooks are not filled with snow- 
water, nor does the mower quench his thirst with 
that alone. The streams are swollen when the 
snow melts in the spring, because nature's work 
has been delayed, the water being turned into 
ice and snow, whose particles are less smooth 
and round, and do not find their level so soon. 
Far over the ice, between the hemlock woods 
and snow-clad hills, stands the pickerel fisher, 
his lines set in some retired cove, like a Fin- 
lander, with his arms thrust into the pouches 
of his dreadnought; with dull, snowy, fishy 
thoughts, himself a finless fish, separated a few 
inches from his race; dumb, erect, and made to 
be enveloped in clouds and snows, like the pines 



A WINTER WALK 125 

on shore. In these wild scenes, men stand about 
in the scenery, or move deliberately and heavily, 
having sacrificed the sprightliness and vivacity 
of towns to the dumb sobriety of nature. He 
does not make the scenery less wild, more than 
the jays and musk-rats, but stands there as a part 
of it, as the natives are represented in the voy- 
ages of early navigators, at Nootka Sound, and 
on the Northwest coast, with their furs about 
them, before they were tempted to loquacity by 
a scrap of iron. He belongs to the natural family 
of man, and is planted deeper in nature and has 
more root than the inhabitants of towns. Go to 
him, ask what luck, and you will learn that he 
too is a worshipper of the unseen. Hear with 
what sincere deference and waving gesture in 
his tone, he speaks of the lake pickerel, which he 
has never seen, his primitive and ideal race of 
pickerel. He is connected with the shore still, 
as by a fish-line, and yet remembers the season 
when he took fish through the ice on the pond, 
while the peas were up in his garden at home. 

But now, while we have loitered, the clouds 
have gathered again, and a few straggling snow- 
flakes are beginning to descend. Faster and 
faster they fall, shutting out the distant objects 
from sight. The snow falls on every wood and 
field, and no crevice is forgotten; by the river 
and the pond, on the hill and in the valley. Quad- 
rupeds are confined to their coverts, and the 



126 EXCURSIONS 

birds sit upon their perches this peaceful hour. 
There is not so much sound as in fair weather, 
but silently and gradually every slope, and the 
gray walls and fences, and the polished ice, and 
the sere leaves, which were not buried before, 
are concealed, and the tracks of men and beasts 
are lost. With so little effort does nature reas- 
sert her rule and blot out the traces of men. 
Hear how Homer has described the same. "The 
snow-flakes fall thick and fast on a winter's day. 
The winds are lulled, and the snow falls inces- 
sant, covering the tops of the mountains, and the 
hills, and the plains where the lotus-tree grows, 
and the cultivated fields, and they are falling 
by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but 
are silently dissolved by the waves.'' The snow 
levels all things, and infolds them deeper in the 
bosom of nature, as, in the slow summer, vegeta- 
tion creeps up to the entablature of the temple, 
and the turrets of the castle, and helps her to 
prevail over art. 

The surly night-wind rustles through the 
wood, and warns us to retrace our steps, while 
the sun goes down behind the thickening storm, 
and birds seek their roosts, and cattle their stalls. 

"Drooping the lab'rer ox 
Stands covered o'er with snow, and now demands 
The fruit of all his toil." 

Though winter is represented in the almanac 
as an old man, facing the wind and sleet, and 




The froxen river 



A WINTER WALK 127 

drawing his clcuk about him, we rather think of 
him as a merry wood-chopper, and warm-blooded 
youth, as blithe as summer. The unexplored 
grandeur of the storm keeps up the spirits of the 
traveller. It does not trifle with us, but has a 
sweet earnestness. In winter we lead a more 
inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, 
like cottages under drifts, whose windows and 
doors are half concealed, but from whose chim- 
neys the smoke cheerfully ascends. The impris- 
oning drifts increase the sense of comfort which 
the house affords, and in the coldest days we are 
content to sit over the hearth and see the sky 
through the chimney top, enjoying the quiet 
and serene life that may be had in a warm corner 
by the chimney side, or feeling our pulse by 
listening to the low of cattle in the street, or the 
sound of the flail in distant barns all the long 
afternoon. No doubt a skilful physician could 
determine our health by observing how these 
simple and natural sounds affected us. We en- 
joy now, not an oriental, but a boreal leisure, 
around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch 
the shadow of motes in the sunbeams. 

Sometimes our fate grows too homely and 
familiarly serious ever to be cruel. Consider how 
for three months the human destiny is wrapped 
in furs. The good Hebrew Revelation takes 
no cognizance of all this cheerful snow. Is there 
no religion for the temperate and frigid zones? 



128 EXCURSIONS 

We know of no scripture which records the pure 
benignity of the gods on a New England winter 
night. Their praises have never been sung, only 
their wrath deprecated. The best scripture, 
after all, records but a meagre faith. Its saints 
live reserved and austere. Let a brave devout 
man spend the year in the woods of Maine or 
Labrador, and see if the Hebrew Scriptures 
speak adequately to his condition and experi- 
ence, from the setting in of winter to the break- 
ing up of the ice. 

Now commences the long winter evening 
around the farmer's hearth, when the thoughts 
of the indwellers travel far abroad, and men are 
by nature and necessity charitable and liberal 
to all creatures. Now is the happy resistance 
to cold, when the farmer reaps his reward, and 
thinks of his preparedness for winter, and, 
through the glittering panes, sees with equa- 
nimity "the mansion of the northern bear," for 
now the storm is over. 

"The full ethereal round, 
Infinite worlds disclosing to the view, 
Shines out intensely keen; and all one cope 
Of starry glitter glows from pole to pole." 



THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST 
TREES x 

[ I860] 

EVERY man is entitled to come to Cattle- 
show, even a transcendentalist ; and for 
my part I am more interested in the men 
than in the cattle. I wish to see once more those 
old familiar faces, whose names I do not know, 
which for me represent the Middlesex country, 
and come as near being indigenous to the soil as 
a white man can; the men who are not above 
their business, whose coats are not too black, 
whose shoes do not shine very much, who never 
wear gloves to conceal their hands. It is true, 
there are some queer specimens of humanity at- 
tracted to our festival, but all are welcome. I 
am pretty sure to meet once more that weak- 
minded and whimsical fellow, generally weak- 
bodied too, who prefers a crooked stick for a 
cane; perfectly useless, you would say, only 
bizarre,, fit for a cabinet, like a petrified snake. 
A ram's horn would be as convenient, and is yet 
more curiously twisted. He brings that much 
indulged bit of the country with him, from some 

1 An address read to the Middlesex Agricultural Society, in 
Concord, September, 1860. 

129 



130 EXCURSIONS 

town's end or other, and introduces it to Con- 
cord groves, as if he had promised it so much 
sometime. So some, it seems to me, elect their 
rulers for their crookedness. But I think that 
a straight stick makes the best cane, and an up- 
right man the best ruler. Or why choose a man 
to do plain work who is distinguished for his 
oddity? However, I do not know but you will 
think that they have committed this mistake who 
invited me to speak to you to-day. 

In my capacity of surveyor, I have often 
talked with some of you, my employers, at your 
dinner-tables, after having gone round and 
round and behind your farming, and ascertained 
exactly what its limits were. Moreover, taking 
a surveyor's and a naturalist's liberty, I have 
been in the habit of going across your lots much 
oftener than is usual, as many of you, perhaps 
to your sorrow, are aware. Yet many of you, 
to my relief, have seemed not to be aware of it; 
and when I came across you in some out-of-the- 
way nook of your farms, have inquired, with an 
air of surprise, if I were not lost, since you had 
never seen me in that part of the town or county 
before ; when, if the truth were known, and it 
had not been for betraying my secret, I might 
with more propriety have inquired if you were 
not lost, since I had never seen you there before. 
I have several times shown the proprietor the 
shortest way out of his wood-lot. 




In the woods 



SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES 131 

Therefore, it would seem that I have some 
title to speak to you to-day; and considering 
what that title is, and the occasion that has called 
us together, I need offer no apology if I invite 
your attention, for the few moments that are 
allotted me, to a purely scientific subject. 

At those dinner-tables referred to, I have 
often been asked, as many of you have been, if 
I could tell how it happened, that when a pine 
wood was cut down an oak one commonly sprang 
up, and vice versa. To which I have answered, 
and now answer, that I can tell, — that it is no 
mystery to me. As I am not aware that this has 
been clearly shown by any one, I shall lay the 
more stress on this point. Let me lead you back 
into your wood-lots again. 

When, hereabouts, a single forest tree or a 
forest springs up naturally where none of its 
kind grew before, I do not hesitate to say, 
though in some quarters still it may sound para- 
doxical, that it came from a seed. Of the various 
ways by which trees are known to be propa- 
gated, — by transplanting, cuttings, and the like, 
— this is the only supposable one under these 
circumstances. No such tree has ever been 
known to spring from anything else. If any 
one asserts that it sprang from something else, 
or from nothing, the burden of proof lies with 
him. 

It remains, then, only to show how the seed is 



132 EXCURSIONS 

transported from where it grows to where it is 
planted. This is done chiefly by the agency of 
the wind, water, and animals. The lighter seeds, 
as those of pines and maples, are transported 
chiefly by wind and water ; the heavier, as acorns 
and nuts, by animals. 

In all the pines, a very thin membrane, in ap- 
pearance much like an insect's wing, grows over 
and around the seed, and independent of it, 
while the latter is being developed within its 
base. Indeed this is often perfectly developed, 
though the seed is abortive; nature being, you 
would say, more sure to provide the means of 
transporting the seed, than to provide the seed 
to be transported. In other words, a beautiful 
thin sack is woven around the seed, with a handle 
to it such as the wind can take hold of, and it is 
then committed to the wind, expressly that it 
may transport the seed and extend the range of 
the species; and this it does, as effectually, as 
when seeds are sent by mail in a different kind of 
sack from the patent-office. There is a patent- 
office at the seat of government of the universe, 
whose managers are as much interested in the 
dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington 
can be, and their operations are infinitely more 
extensive and regular. 

There is then no necessity for supposing that 
the pines have sprung up from nothing, and I 
am aware that I am not at all peculiar in assert- 



SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES 133 

ing that they come from seeds, though the mode 
of their propagation by nature has been but 
little attended to. They are very extensively 
raised from the seed in Europe, and are begin- 
ning to be here. 

When you cut down an oak wood, a pine wood 
will not at once spring up there unless there are, 
or have been, quite recently, seed-bearing pines 
near enough for the seeds to be blown from them. 
But, adjacent to a forest of pines, if you prevent 
other crops from growing there, you will surely 
have an extension of your pine forest, provided 
the soil is suitable. 

As for the heavy seeds and nuts which are not 
furnished with wings, the notion is still a very 
common one that, when the trees which bear 
these spring up where none of their kind were 
noticed before, they have come from seeds or 
other principles spontaneously generated there 
in an unusual manner, or which have lain dor- 
mant in the soil for centuries, or perhaps been 
called into activity by the heat of a burning. I 
do not believe these assertions, and I will state 
some of the ways in which, according to my ob- 
servation, such forests are planted and raised. 

Every one of these seeds, too, will be found 
to be winged or legged in another fashion. 
Surely it is not wonderful that cherry-trees of 
all kinds are widely dispersed, since their fruit is 
well known to be the favorite food of various 



A/> 



134 EXCURSIONS 

birds. Many kinds are called bird-cherries, and 
they appropriate many more kinds, which are 
not so called. Eating cherries is a bird-like em- 
ployment, and unless we disperse the seeds oc- 
casionally, as they do, I shall think that the birds 
have the best right to them. See how artfully 
the seed of the cherry is placed in order that a 
bird may be compelled to transport it — in the 
very midst of a tempting pericarp, so that the 
creature that would devour this must commonly 
take the stone also into its mouth or bill. If you 
ever ate a cherry, and did not make two bites of 
it, you must have perceived it — right in the 
centre of the luscious morsel, a large earthy resid- 
uum left on the tongue. We thus take into our 
mouths cherry stones as big as peas, a dozen at 
once, for Nature can persuade us to do almost 
anything when she would compass her ends. 
Some wild men and children instinctively swal- 
low these, as the birds do when in a hurry, it 
being the shortest way to get rid of them. Thus, 
though these seeds are not provided with vege- 
table wings, Nature has impelled the thrush tribe 
to take them into their bills and fly away with 
them ; and they are winged in another sense, and 
more effectually than the seeds of pines, for 
these are carried even against the wind. The 
consequence is, that cherry-trees grow not only 
here but there. The same is true of a great 
many other seeds. 



SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES 135 

But to come to the observation which sug- 
gested these remarks. As I have said, I suspect 
that I can throw some light on the fact, that 
when hereabouts a dense pine wood is cut down, 
oaks and other hard woods may at once take its 
place. I have got only to show that the acorns 
and nuts, provided they are grown in the neigh- 
borhood, are regularly planted in such woods; 
for I assert that if an oak-tree has not grown 
within ten miles, and man has not carried acorns 
thither, then an oak wood will not spring up at 
once, when a pine wood is cut down. 

Apparently, there were only pines there be- 
fore. They are cut off, and after a year or two 
you see oaks and other hard woods springing up 
there, with scarcely a pine amid them, and the 
wonder commonly is, how the seed could have 
lain in the ground so long without decaying. 
But the truth is, that it has not lain in the ground 
so long, but is regularly planted each year by 
various quadrupeds and birds. 

In this neighborhood, where oaks and pines 
are about equally dispersed, if you look through 
the thickest pine wood, even the seemingly un- 
mixed pitch-pine ones, you will commonly detect 
many little oaks, birches, and other hard woods, 
sprung from seeds carried into the thicket by 
squirrels and other animals, and also blown 
thither, but which are overshadowed and choked 
by the pines. The denser the evergreen wood, 



136 EXCURSIONS 

the more likely it is to be well planted with these 
seeds, because the planters incline to. resort with 
their forage to the closest covert. They also 
carry it into birch and other woods. This plant- 
ing is carried on annually, and the oldest seed- 
lings annually die; but when the pines are 
cleared off, the oaks, having got just the start 
they want, and now secured favorable conditions 
immediately spring up to trees. 

The shade of a dense pine wood, is more un- 
favorable to the springing up of pines of the 
same species than of oaks within it, though the 
former may come up abundantly when the pines 
are cut, if there chance to be sound seed in the 
ground. 

But when you cut off a lot of hard wood, very 
often the little pines mixed with it have a similar 
start, for the squirrels have carried off the nuts 
to the pines, and not to the more open wood, and 
they commonly make pretty clean work of it; 
and moreover, if the wood was old, the sprouts 
will be feeble or entirely fail; to say nothing 
about the soil being, in a measure, exhausted for 
this kind of crop. 

If a pine wood is surrounded by a white oak 
one chiefly, white oaks may be expected to suc- 
ceed when the pines are cut. If it is surrounded 
instead by an edging of shrub-oaks, then you 
will probably have a dense shrub-oak thicket. 

I have no time to go into details, but will say, 



SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES 137 

in a word, that while the wind is conveying the 
seeds of pines into hard woods and open lands, 
the squirrels and other animals are conveying 
the seeds of oaks and walnuts into the pine 
woods, and thus a rotation of crops is kept up. 

I affirmed this confidently many years ago, 
and an occasional examination of dense pine 
woods confirmed me in my opinion. It has long 
been known to observers that squirrels bury nuts 
in the ground, but I am not aware that any one 
has thus accounted for the regular succession of 
forests. 

On the 24th of September, in 1857, as I was 
paddling down the Assabet, in this town, I saw 
a red squirrel run along the bank under some 
herbage, with something large in its mouth. It 
stopped near the foot of a hemlock, within a 
couple of rods of me, and. hastily pawing a hole 
with its forefeet, dropped its booty into it, cov- 
ered it up, and retreated part way up the trunk 
of the tree. As I approached the shore to ex- 
amine the deposit, the squirrel, descending part 
way, betrayed no little anxiety about its treasure, 
and made two or three motions to recover it be- 
fore it finally retreated. Digging there, I found 
two green pig-nuts joined together, with the 
thick husks on, buried about an inch and a half 
under the reddish soil of decayed hemlock leaves, 
— just the right depth to plant it. In short, this 
squirrel was then engaged in accomplishing two 



138 EXCURSIONS 

objects, to wit, laying up a store of winter food 
for itself, and planting a hickory wood for all 
creation. If the squirrel was killed, or neglected 
its deposit, a hickory would spring up. The 
nearest hickory tree was twenty rods distant. 
These nuts were there still just fourteen days 
later, but were gone when I looked again, No- 
vember 21, or six weeks later still. 

I have since examined more carefully several 
dense woods, which are said to be, and are ap- 
parently exclusively pine, and always with the 
same result. For instance, I walked the same 
day to a small, but very dense and handsome 
white-pine grove, about fifteen rods square, in 
the east part of this town. The trees are large 
for Concord, being from ten to twenty inches in 
diameter, and as exclusively pine as any wood 
that I know. Indeed, I selected this wood be- 
cause I thought it the least likely to contain any- 
thing else. It stands on an open plain or pas- 
ture, except that it adjoins another small pine 
wood, which has a few little oaks in it, on the 
southeast side. On every other side, it was at 
least thirty rods from the nearest woods. Stand- 
ing on the edge of this grove and looking through 
it, for it is quite level and free from underwood, 
for the most part bare, red-carpeted ground, 
you would have said that there was not a hard- 
wood tree in it, young or old. But on looking 
carefully along over its floor I discovered, 




The mouth of the Assabet 



SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES 139 

though it was not till my eye had got used to the 
search, that, alternating with thin ferns, and 
small blueberry bushes, there was, not merely 
here and there, but as often as every five feet and 
with a degree of regularity, a little oak, from 
three to twelve inches high, and in one place I 
found a green acorn dropped by the base of a 
pine. 

I confess, I was surprised to find my theory 
so perfectly proved in this case. One of the 
principal agents in this planting, the red squir- 
rels, were all the while curiously inspecting me, 
while I was inspecting their plantation. Some 
of the little oaks had been browsed by cows, 
which resorted to this wood for shade. 

After seven or eight years, the hard woods evi- 
dently find such a locality unfavorable to their 
growth, the pines being allowed to stand. As 
an evidence of this, I observed a diseased red- 
maple twenty-five feet long, which had been re- 
cently prostrated, though it was still covered 
with green leaves, the only maple in any position 
in the wood. 

But although these oaks almost invariably die 
if the pines are not cut down, it is probable that 
they do better for a few years under their shelter 
than they would anywhere else. 

The very extensive and thorough experiments 
of the English have at length led them to adopt 
a method of raising oaks almost precisely like 



140 EXCURSIONS 

this, which somewhat earlier had been adopted 
by nature and her squirrels here; they have 
simply rediscovered the value of pines as nurses 
for oaks. The English experimenters seem 
early and generally, to have found out the im- 
portance of using trees of some kind, as nurse- 
plants for the young oaks. I quote from Lou- 
don what he describes as "the ultimatum on the 
subject of planting and sheltering oaks," — "an 
abstract of the practice adopted by the govern- 
ment officers in the national forests" of England, 
prepared by Alexander Milne. 

At first some oaks had been planted by them- 
selves, and others mixed with Scotch pines; "but 
in all cases," says Mr. Milne, "where oaks were 
planted actually among the pines, and surround- 
ed by them, [though the soil might be inferior,] 
the oaks were found to be much the best." "For 
several years past, the plan pursued has been to 
plant the inclosures with Scotch pines only, [a 
tree very similar to our pitch-pine] and when 
the pines have got to the height of five or six 
feet, then to put in good strong oak plants of 
about four or five years' growth among the pines, 
— not cutting away any pines at first, unless 
they happen to be so strong and thick as to over- 
shadow the oaks. In about two years, it becomes 
necessary to shred the branches of the pines, to 
give light and air to the oaks, and in about two 
or three more years to begin gradually to remove 



SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES 141 

the pines altogether, taking out a certain number 
each year, so that, at the end of twenty or twenty- 
five years, not a single Scotch pine shall be left ; 
although, for the first ten or twelve years, the 
plantation may have appeared to contain nothing 
else but pine. The advantage of this mode of 
planting has been found to be that the pines dry 
and ameliorate the soil, destroying the coarse 
grass and brambles which frequently choke and 
injure oaks; and that no mending over is neces- 
sary, as scarcely an oak so planted is found to 
fail." 

Thus much the English planters have discov- 
ered by patient experiment, and, for aught I 
know, they have taken out a patent for it; but 
they appear not to have discovered that it was 
discovered before, and that they are merely 
adopting the method of Nature, which she long 
ago made patent to all. She is all the while plant- 
ing the oaks amid the pines without our knowl- 
edge, and at last, instead of government officers, 
we send a party of wood-choppers to cut down 
the pines, and so rescue an oak forest, at which 
we wonder as if it had dropped from the skies. 

As I walk amid hickories, even in August, I 
hear the sound of green pig-nuts falling from 
time to time, cut off by the chickaree over my 
head. In the fall, I notice on the ground, either 
within or in the neighborhood of oak woods, on 
all sides of the town, stout oak twigs three or four 



142 EXCURSIONS 

inches long, bearing half-a-dozen empty acorn- 
cups, which twigs have been gnawed off by squir- 
rels, on both side of the nuts, in order to make 
them more portable. The jays scream and the 
red squirrels scold while you are clubbing 
and shaking the chestnut trees, for they are there 
on the same errand, and two of a trade never 
agree. I frequently see a red or gray squirrel 
cast down a green chestnut burr, as I am going 
through the woods, and I used to think, some- 
times, that they were cast at me. In fact, they 
are so busy about it, in the midst of the chestnut 
season, that you cannot stand long in the woods 
without hearing one fall. A sportsman told me 
that he had, the day before, — that was in the 
middle of October, — seen a green chestnut burr 
dropped on our great river meadow, fifty rods 
from the nearest wood, and much further from 
the nearest chestnut tree, and he could not tell 
how it came there. Occasionally, when chest- 
nutting in midwinter, I find thirty or forty nuts 
in a pile, left in its gallery, just under the leaves, 
by the common wood-mouse (mus leucopus). 

But especially, in the winter, the extent to 
which this transportation and planting of nuts 
is carried on is made apparent by the snow. In 
almost every wood, you will see where the red or 
gray squirrels have pawed down through the 
snow in a hundred places, sometimes two feet 
deep, and almost always directly to a nut or a 



SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES 143 

pine-cone, as directly as if they had started from 
it and bored upward, — which you and I could 
not have done. It would be difficult for us to 
find one before the snow falls. Commonly, no 
doubt, they had deposited them there in the fall. 
You wonder if they remember the localities, or 
discover them by the scent. The red squirrel 
commonly has its winter abode in the earth 
under a thicket of evergreens, frequently under 
a small clump of evergreens in the midst of a 
deciduous wood. If there are any nut-trees, 
which still retain their nuts, standing at a dis- 
tance without the wood, their paths often lead 
directly to and from them. We, therefore, need 
not suppose an oak standing here and there in 
the wood in order to seed it, but if a few stand 
within twenty or thirty rods of it, it is sufficient. 
I think that I may venture to say that every 
white-pine cone that falls to the earth naturally 
in this town, before opening and losing its seeds, 
and almost every pitch-pine one that falls at all, 
is cut off by a squirrel, and they begin to pluck 
them long before they are ripe, so that when the 
crop of white-pine cones is a small one, as it com- 
monly is, they cut off thus almost every one of 
these before it fairly ripens. I think, moreover, 
that their design, if I may so speak, in cutting 
them off green, is, partly, to prevent their open- 
ing and losing their seeds, for these are the ones 
for which they dig through the snow, and the 



144 EXCURSIONS 

only white-pine cones which contain anything 
then. I have counted in one heap, within a 
diameter of four feet, the cores of 239 pitch-pine 
cones which had been cut off and stripped by the 
red squirrel the previous winter. 

The nuts thus left on the surface, or buried 
just beneath it, are placed in the most favorable 
circumstances for germinating. I have some- 
times wondered how those which merely fell on 
the surface of the earth got planted ; but, by the 
end of December, I find the chestnut of the same 
year partially mixed with the mould, as it were, 
under the decaying and mouldy leaves, where 
there is all the moisture and manure they want, 
for the nuts fall first. In a plentiful year, a large 
proportion of the nuts are thus covered loosely an 
inch deep, and are, of course, somewhat concealed 
from squirrels. One winter, when the crop 
had been abundant, I got, with the aid of a rake, 
many quarts of these nuts as late as the tenth 
of January, and though some bought at the store 
the same day were more than half of them 
mouldy, I did not find a single mouldy one 
among these which I picked from under the wet 
and mouldy leaves, where they had been snowed 
on once or twice. Nature knows how to pack 
them best. They were still plump and tender. 
Apparently, they do not heat there, though wet. 
In the spring they were all sprouting. 

Loudon says that "when the nut [of the com- 







it 




The snowy woodland 



SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES 145 

mon walnut of Europe] is to be preserved 
through the winter for the purpose of planting 
in the following spring, it should be laid in a rot- 
heap, as soon as gathered, with the husk on; 
and the heap should be turned over frequently 
in the course of the winter." 

Here, again, he is stealing Nature's "thunder." 
How can a poor mortal do otherwise? for it is 
she that finds fingers to steal with, and the treas- 
ure to be stolen. In the planting of the seeds of 
most trees, the best gardeners do no more than 
follow Nature, though they may not know it. 
Generally, both large and small ones are most 
sure to germinate, and succeed best, when only 
beaten into the earth with the back of a spade, 
and then covered with leaves or straw. These 
results to which planters have arrived, remind 
us of the experience of Kane and his companions 
at the North, who, when learning to live in that 
climate, were surprised to find themselves stead- 
ily adopting the customs of the natives, simply 
becoming Esquimaux. So, when we experiment 
in planting forests, we find ourselves at last do- 
ing as Nature does. Would it not be well to con- 
sult with Nature in the outset ? for she is the most 
extensive and experienced planter of us all, not 
excepting the Dukes of Athol. 

In short, they who have not attended particu- 
larly to this subject are but little aware to what 
an extent quadrupeds and birds are employed, 



146 EXCURSIONS 

especially in the fall, in collecting, and so dis- 
seminating and planting the seeds of trees. It 
is the almost constant employment of the squir- 
rels at that season, and you rarely meet with one 
that has not a nut in its mouth, or is not just 
going to get one. One squirrel-hunter of this 
town told me that he knew of a walnut-tree 
which bore particularly good nuts, but that on 
going to gather them one fall, he found that he 
had been anticipated by a family of a dozen red 
squirrels. He took out of the tree, which was hol- 
low, one bushel and three pecks by measurement, 
without the husks, and they supplied him and his 
family for the winter. It would be easy to multi- 
ply instances of this kind. How commonly in 
the fall you see the cheek-pouches of the striped 
squirrel distended by a quantity of nuts! This 
species gets its scientific name Tamias, or the 
steward, from its habit of storing up nuts and 
other seeds. Look under a nut-tree a month after 
the nuts have fallen, and see what proportion of 
sound nuts to the abortive ones and shells you 
will find ordinarily. They have been already 
eaten, or dispersed far and wide. The ground 
looks like a platform before a grocery, where the 
gossips of the village sit to crack nuts and less 
savory jokes. You have come, you would say, 
after the feast was over, and are presented with 
the shells only. 

Occasionally, when threading the woods in 



SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES 147 

the fall, you will hear a sound as if some one 
had broken a twig, and, looking up, see a jay 
pecking at an acorn, or you will see a flock of 
them at once about it, in the top of an oak, and 
hear them break them off. They then fly to a 
suitable limb, and placing the acorn under one 
foot, hammer away at it busily, making a sound 
like a woodpecker's tapping, looking round 
from time to time to see if any foe is approach- 
ing, and soon reach the meat, and nibble at it, 
holding up their heads to swallow, while they 
hold the remainder very firmly with their claws. 
Nevertheless, it often drops to the ground before 
the bird has done with it. I can confirm what 
Wm. Bartram wrote to Wilson, the Ornitholo- 
gist, that "The jay is one of the most useful 
agents in the economy of nature, for disseminat- 
ing forest trees and other nuciferous and hard- 
seeded vegetables on which they feed. Their 
chief employment during the autumnal season 
is foraging to supply their winter stores. In 
performing this necessary duty they drop abun- 
dance of seed in their flight over fields, hedges, 
and by fences, where they alight to deposit them 
in the post-holes, &c. It is remarkable what 
numbers of young trees rise up in fields and pas- 
tures after a wet winter and spring. These 
birds alone are capable, in a few years' time, to 
replant all the cleared lands." 

I have noticed that squirrels also frequently 



148 EXCURSIONS 

drop their nuts in open land, which will still 
further account for the oaks and walnuts which 
spring up in pastures, for, depend on it, every 
new tree comes from a seed. When I examine 
the little oaks, one or two years old, in such 
places, I invariably find the empty acorn from 
which they sprung. 

So far from the seed having lain dormant in 
the soil since oaks grew there before, as many 
believe, it is well known that it is difficult to pre- 
serve the vitality of acorns long enough to trans- 
port them to Europe; and it is recommended in 
Loudon's Arboretum, as the safest course, to 
sprout them in pots on the voyage. The same 
authority states that "very few acorns of any 
species will germinate after having been kept a 
year," that beechmast, "only retains its vital 
properties one year," and the black- walnut, "sel- 
dom more than six months after it has ripened." 
I have frequently found that in November, al- 
most every acorn left on the ground had sprouted 
or decayed. What with frost, drouth, moisture, 
and worms, the greater part are soon destroyed. 
Yet it is stated by one botanical writer that 
"acorns that have lain for centuries, on being 
ploughed up, have soon vegetated." 

Mr. George B. Emerson, in his valuable 
Report on the Trees and Shrubs of this State, 
says of the pines: "The tenacity of life of the 
seeds is remarkable. They will remain for many 



SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES 149 

years unchanged in the ground, protected by 
the coolness and deep shade of the forest above 
them. But when the forest is removed, and the 
warmth of the sun admitted, they immediately 
vegetate." Since he does not tell us on what 
observation his remark is founded, I must doubt 
its truth. Besides, the experience of nurserymen 
makes it the more questionable. 

The stories of wheat raised from seed buried 
with an ancient Egyptian, and of raspberries 
raised from seed found in the stomach of a man 
in England, who is supposed to have died six- 
teen or seventeen hundred years ago, are gen- 
erally discredited, simply because the evidence 
is not conclusive. 

Several men of science, Dr. Carpenter among 
them, have used the statement that beach-plums 
sprang up in sand which was dug up forty miles 
inland in Maine, to prove that the seed had lain 
there a very long time, and some have inferred 
that the coast has receded so far. But it seems to 
me necessary to their argument to show, first, 
that beach-plums grow only on a beach. They 
are not uncommon here, which is about half that 
distance from the shore ; and I remember a dense 
patch a few miles north of us, twenty-five miles 
inland, from which the fruit was annually car- 
ried to market. How much further inland they 
grow, I know not. Dr. Chas. T. Jackson speaks 
of finding "beach-plums" (perhaps they were 



150 EXCURSIONS 

this kind) more than one hundred miles inland 
in Maine. 

It chances that similar objections lie against 
all the more notorious instances of the kind on 
record. 

Yet I am prepared to believe that some seeds, 
especially small ones, may retain their vitality 
for centuries under favorable circumstances. In 
the spring of 1859, the old Hunt House, so 
called, in this town, whose chimney bore the date 
1703, was taken down. This stood on land 
which belonged to John Winthrop, the first 
Governor of Massachusetts, and a part of the 
house was evidently much older than the above 
date, and belonged to the Winthrop family. For 
many years, I have ransacked this neighborhood 
for plants, and I consider myself familiar with 
its productions. Thinking of the seeds which 
are said to be sometimes dug up at an unusual 
depth in the earth, and thus to reproduce long 
extinct plants, it occurred to me last fall that 
some new or rare plants might have sprung up in 
the cellar of this house, which had been covered 
from the light so long. Searching there on the 
22d of September, I found, among other rank 
weeds, a species of nettle (Urtica urens), which 
I had not found before; dill, which I had not 
seen growing spontaneously; the Jerusalem oak 
(Chenopodium botrys), which I had seen wild 
in but one place; black nightshade (Solatium ni- 



SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES 151 

grum) , which is quite rare hereabouts, and com- 
mon tobacco, which, though it was often culti- 
vated here in the last century, has for fifty years 
been an unknown plant in this town, and a few 
months before this not even I had heard that 
one man in the north part of the town, was culti- 
vating a few plants for his own use. I have no 
doubt that some or all of these plants sprang 
from seeds which had long been buried under or 
about that house, and that that tobacco is an ad- 
ditional evidence that the plant was formerly cul- 
tivated here. The cellar has been filled up this 
year, and four of those plants, including the 
tobacco, are now again extinct in that locality. 

It is true, I have shown that the animals con- 
sume a great part of the seeds of trees, and so, 
at least, effectually prevent their becoming trees ; 
but in all these cases, as I have said, the con- 
sumer is compelled to be at the same time the dis- 
perser and planter, and this is the tax which he 
pays to nature. I think it is Linnaeus, who says, 
that while the swine is rooting for acorns, he is 
planting acorns. 

Though I do not believe that a plant will 
spring up where no seed has been, I have great 
faith in a seed — a, to me, equally mysterious 
origin for it. Convince me that you have a seed 
there, and I am prepared to expect wonders. I 
shall even believe that the millennium is at hand, 
and that the reign of justice is about to com- 



152 EXCURSIONS 

mence, when the Patent Office, or Government, 
begins to distribute, and the people to plant the 
seeds of these things. 

In the spring of 1857, I planted six seeds sent 
to me from the Patent Office, and labelled, I 
think, "Poitrine jaune grossed large yellow 
squash. Two came up, and one bore a squash 
which weighed 123% pounds, the other bore four, 
weighing together 18 6% pounds. Who would 
have believed that there was 310 pounds of 
poitrine jaune grosse in that corner of my gar- 
den? These seeds were the bait I used to catch 
it, my ferrets which I sent into its burrow, my 
brace of terriers which unearthed it. A little 
hysterious hoeing and manuring was all the abra 
cadabra presto-change, that I used, and lo! true 
to the label, they found for me 310 pounds of 
poitrine jaune grosse there, where it never was 
known to be, nor was before. These talismans 
had perchance sprung from America at first, 
and returned to it with unabated force. The big 
squash took a premium at your fair that fall, 
and I understood that the man who bought it, 
intended to sell the seeds for ten cents a piece. 
(Were they not cheap at that?) But I have 
more hounds of the same breed. I learn that one 
which I despatched to a distant town, true to its 
instinct, points to the large yellow squash there, 
too, where no hound ever found it before, as its 
ancestors did here and in France. 



SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES 153 

Other seeds I have which will find other 
things in that corner of my garden, in like fash- 
ion, almost any fruit you wish, every year for 
ages, until the crop more than fills the whole 
garden. You have but little more to do, than 
throw up your cap for entertainment these 
American days. Perfect alchemists I keep, who 
can transmute substances without end; and thus 
the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible 
treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but 
the value which gold merely represents; and 
there is no Signor Blitz about it. Yet farmers' 
sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw 
ribbons from his throat, though he tells them it is 
all deception. Surely, men love darkness rather 
than light. 



WALKING 

[ 1862 ] 

I WISH to speak a word for Nature, for ab- 
solute freedom and wildness, as contrasted 
with a freedom and culture merely civil, — 
to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and 
parcel of Nature, rather than a member of 
society. I wish to make an extreme statement, 
if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are 
enough champions of civilization: the minister 
and the school-committee, and every one of you 
will take care of that. 

I have met with but one or two persons in the 
course of my life who understood the art of 
Walking, that is, of taking walks, — who had a 
genius, so to speak, for sauntering : which word 
is beautifully derived from "idle people who 
roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, 
and asked charity, under pretence of going a la 
Sainte Terre" to the Holy Land, till the chil- 
dren exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer/ J 
a Saunterer, — a Holy-Lander. They who never 
go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pre- 
tend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but 
they who do go there are saunterers in the good 

154 



WALKING 155 

sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would 
derive the word from sans terre, without land 
or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, 
will mean, having no particular home, but equal- 
ly at home everywhere. For this is the secret 
of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a 
house all the time may be the greatest vagrant 
of all ; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no 
more vagrant than the meandering river, which 
is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest 
course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, 
indeed, is the most probable derivation. For 
every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some 
Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and recon- 
quer this Holy Land from the hands of the In- 
fidels. 

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, 
even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no 
persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our ex- 
peditions are but tours, and come round again 
at evening to the old hearth-side from which we 
set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. 
We should go forth on the shortest walk, per- 
chance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never 
to return, — prepared to send back our embalmed 
hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. 
If you are ready to leave father and mother, and 
brother and sister, and wife and child and 
friends and never see them again, — if you have 
paid your debts, and made your will, and settled 



156 EXCURSIONS 

all your affairs, and are a free man, then you 
are ready for a walk. 

To come down to my own experience, my 
companion and I, for I sometimes have a com- 
panion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves 
knights of a new, or rather an old, order, — not 
Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Hitters or riders, 
but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable 
class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit 
which once belonged to the Rider seems now to 
reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the 
Walker, — not the Knight, but Walker Errant. 
He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church 
and State and People. 

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts 
practised this noble art ; though, to tell the truth, 
at least, if their own assertions are to be received, 
most of my townsmen would fain walk some- 
times, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can 
buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and indepen- 
dence, which are the capital in this profession. 
It comes only by the grace of God. It requires 
a direct dispensation from Heaven to become 
a walker. You must be born into the fam- 
ily of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non jit. 
Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember 
and have described to me some walks which they 
took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed 
as to lose themselves for half an hour in the 
woods ; but I know very well that they have con- 



WALKING 157 

fined themselves to the highway ever since, what- 
ever pretensions they may make to belong to this 
select class. No doubt they were elevated for a 
moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state 
of existence, when even they were foresters and 
outlaws. 

"When he came to grene wode, 
In a mery mornynge, 
There he herde the notes small 
Of byrdes mery syngynge. 

"It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn, 
That I was last here; 
Me lyste a lytell for to shote 
At the donne dere." 

I think that I cannot preserve my health and 
spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least, 
— and it is commonly more than that, — saunter- 
ing through the woods and over the hills and 
fields, absolutely free from all worldly engage- 
ments. You may safely say, A penny for your 
thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When some- 
times I am reminded that the mechanics and 
shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the 
forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with 
crossed legs, so many of them,— as if the legs 
were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk 
upon, — I think that they deserve some credit for 
not having all committed suicide long ago. 

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single 
day without acquiring some rust, and when some- 



158 EXCURSIONS 

times I have stolen forth for a walk at the 
eleventh hour of four o'clock in the afternoon, 
too late to redeem the day, when the shades of 
night were already beginning to be mingled with 
the daylight, have felt as if I had committed 
some sin to be atoned for, — I confess that I am 
astonished at the power of endurance, to say noth- 
ing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors 
who confine themselves to shops and offices the 
whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years 
almost together. I know not what manner of 
stuff they are of, — sitting there now at three 
o'clock in the afternoon, as if it were three 
o'clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of 
the three-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, but it 
is nothing to the courage which can sit down 
cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over 
against one's self whom you have known all the 
morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you 
are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I 
wonder that about this time, or say between four 
and five o'clock in the afternoon, too late for the 
morning papers and too early for the evening 
ones, there is not a general explosion heard up 
and down the street, scattering a legion of anti- 
quated and housebred notions and whims to the 
four winds for an airing, — and so the evil cure 
itself. 

How womankind, who are confined to the 
house still more than men, stand it I do not know; 



WALKING 159 

but I have ground to suspect that most of them 
do not stand it at all. When, early in the sum- 
mer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of 
the village from the skirts of our garments, mak- 
ing haste past those houses with purely Doric or 
Gothic fronts, which have such an air of repose 
about them, my companion whispers that prob- 
ably about these times their occupants are all 
gone to bed. Then it is that I appreciate the 
beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself 
never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, 
keeping watch over the slumberers. 

No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, 
have a good deal to do with it. As a man grows 
older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor 
occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in 
his habits as the evening of life approaches, till 
at last he comes forth only just before sundown, 
and gets all the walk that he requires in half an 
hour. 

But the walking of which I speak has nothing 
in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the 
sick take medicine at stated hours, — as the swing- 
ing of dumb-bells or chairs ; but is itself the enter- 
prise and adventure of the day. If you would 
get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. 
Think of a man's swinging dumb-bells for his 
health, when those springs are bubbling up in far- 
off pastures unsought by him! 

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which 



160 EXCURSIONS 

is said to be the only beast which ruminates 
when walking. When a traveller asked Words- 
worth's servant to show him her master's study, 
she answered, "Here is his library, but his study 
is out of doors." 

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, 
will no doubt produce a certain roughness of 
character, — will cause a thicker cuticle to grow 
over some of the finer qualities of our nature, 
as on the face and hands, or as severe manual 
labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of 
touch. So staying in the house, on the other 
hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, 
not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an 
increased sensibility to certain impressions. Per- 
haps we should be more susceptible to some in- 
fluences important to our intellectual and moral 
growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown 
on us a little less ; and no doubt it is a nice matter 
to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. 
But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast 
enough, — that the natural remedy is to be found 
in the proportion which the night bears to the 
day, the winter to the summer, thought to ex- 
perience. There will be so much the more air 
and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms 
of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of 
self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the 
heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That 
is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and 



WALKING 161 

thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus 
of experience. 

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields 
and woods: what would become of us, if we 
walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some 
sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of 
importing the woods to themselves, since they 
did not go to the woods. "They planted groves 
and walks of Platanes," where they took sub- 
diales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. 
Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to 
the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am 
alarmed when it happens that I have walked a 
mile into the woods bodily, without getting there 
in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain 
forget all my morning occupations and my obli- 
gations to society. But it sometimes happens 
that I cannot easily shake off the village. The 
thought of some work will run in my head, and 
I am not where my body is, — I am out of my 
senses. In my walks I would fain return to my 
senses. What business have I in the woods, if 
I am thinking of something out of the woods ? I 
suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder, when 
I find myself so implicated even in what are 
called good works, — for this may sometimes 
happen. 

My vicinity affords many good walks; and 
though for so many years I have walked almost 
every day, and sometimes for several days to- 



162 EXCURSIONS 

gether, I have not yet exhausted them. An ab- 
solutely new prospect is a great happiness, and 
I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three 
hours' walking will carry me to as strange a 
country as I expect ever to see. A single farm- 
house which I had not seen before is sometimes 
as good as the dominions of the King of Da- 
homey. There is in fact a sort of harmony dis- 
coverable between the capabilities of the land- 
scape within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the 
limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore 
years and ten of human life. It will never be- 
come quite familiar to you. 

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so 
called, as the building of houses, and the cutting 
down of the forest and of all large trees, simply 
deform the landscape, and make it more and more 
tame and cheap. A people who would begin by 
burning the fences and let the forest stand! I 
saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in 
the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser 
with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while 
heaven had taken place around him, and he did 
not see the angels going to and fro, but was 
looking for an old post-hole in the midst of para- 
dise. I looked again, and saw him standing in 
the middle of a boggy, stygian fen, surrounded 
by devils, and he had found his bounds without 
a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had 



WALKING 163 

been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the 
Prince of Darkness was his surveyor. 

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any num- 
ber of miles, commencing at my own door, with- 
out going by any house, without crossing a road 
except where the fox and the mink do: first 
along by the river, and then the brook, and then 
the meadow and the woodside. There are square 
miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. 
From many a hill I can see civilization and the 
abodes of man afar. The farmers and their 
works are scarcely more obvious than wood- 
chucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, 
church and state and school, trade and commerce, 
and manufacturers and agriculture, even politics, 
the most alarming of them all, — I am pleased to 
see how little space they occupy in the landscape. 
Politics is but a narrow field, and that still nar- 
rower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes 
direct the traveller thither. If you would go to 
the political world, follow the great road, — fol- 
low that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, 
and it will lead you straight to it ; for it, too, has 
its place merely, and does not occupy all space. 
I pass from it as from a bean-field into the forest, 
and it is forgotten. In one-half hour I can walk 
off to some portion of the earth's surface where 
a man does not stand from one year's end to an- 
other, and there, consequently, politics are not, 
for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man. 



164 EXCURSIONS 

The village is the place to which the roads 
tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a 
lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are 
the arms and legs, — a trivial or quadrivial place, 
the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers. 
The word is from the Latin villa, which, together 
with via, sl way, or more anciently ved and vella, 
Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the 
villa is the place to and from which things are 
carried. They who got their living by teaming 
were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, ap- 
parently, the Latin word vilis and our vile; 
also villain. This suggests what kind of degen- 
eracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn 
by the travel that goes by and over them, with- 
out travelling themselves. 

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the 
highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are 
made for horses and men of business. I do not 
travel in them much, comparatively, because I 
am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery 
or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I 
am a good horse to travel, but not from choice 
a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the fig- 
ures of men to mark a road. He would not make 
that use of my figure. I walk out into a Nature 
such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, 
Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it 
America, but it is not America : neither Americus 
Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the 



WALKING 165 

discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it 
in mythology than in any history of America, so 
called, that I have seen. 

However, there are a few old roads that may 
be trodden with profit, as if they led somewhere 
now that they are nearly discontinued. There is 
the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go 
to Marlborough now, methinks, unless that is 
Marlborough where it carries me. I am the 
bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that 
there are one or two such roads in every town. 

THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD 

Where they once dug for money, 

But never found any; 

Where sometimes Martial Miles 

Singly files, 

And Elijah Wood, 

I fear for no good: 

No other man, 

Save Elisha Dugan, — 

O man of wild habits, 

Partridges and rabbits, 

Who hast no cares 

Only to set snares, 

Who liv'st all alone, 

Close to the bone, 

And where life is sweetest 

Constantly eatest. 
When the spring stirs my blood 
With the instinct to travel, 
I can get enough gravel, 
On the Old Marlborough Road. 

Nobody repairs it, 

For nobody wears it; 



166 EXCURSIONS 

It is a living way, 
As the Christians say. 
Not many there be 

Who enter therein, 
Only the guests of the 

Irishman Quin. 
What is it, what is it, 

But a direction out there, 
And the bare possibility 

Of going somewhere? 

Great guideboards of stone, 

But travellers none; 

Cenotaphs of the towns 

Named on their crowns. 

It is worth going to see 

Where you might be. 

What king 

Did the thing, 

I am still wondering; 

Set up how or when, 

By what selectmen, 

Gourgas or Lee, 

Clark or Darby? 

They're a great endeavor 

To be something forever; 

Blank tablets of stone, 

Where a traveller might groan, 

And in one sentence 

Grave all that is known; 

Which another might read, 

In his extreme need. 

I know one or two 

Lines that would do, 

Literature that might stand 

All over the land, 

Which a man could remember 

Till next December, 

And read again in the spring, 

After the thawing;. 




On the Old Marlborough Road 



WALKING 167 

If with fancy unfurled 

You leave your abode, 
You may go round the world 

By the Old Marlborough Road. 

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the 
land is not private property; the landscape is 
not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative 
freedom. But possibly the day will come when 
it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure- 
grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and 
exclusive pleasure only, — when fences shall be 
multiplied, and man-traps and other engines in- 
vented to confine men to the public road, and 
walking over the surface of God's earth shall be 
construed to mean trespassing on some gentle- 
man's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively 
is commonly to exclude yourself from the true 
enjoyment of it. Let us improve our oppor- 
tunities, then, before the evil days come. 

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to 
determine whither we will walk? I believe that 
there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if 
we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. 
It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. 
There is a right way ; but we are very liable from 
heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong 
one. We would fain take that walk, never yet 
taken by us through this actual world, which is 
perfectly symbolical of the path which we love 



168 EXCURSIONS 

to travel in the interior and ideal world; and 
sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose 
our direction, because it does not yet exist dis- 
tinctly in our idea. 

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncer- 
tain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and sub- 
mit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, 
strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I 
finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward 
some particular wood or meadow or deserted 
pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is 
slow to settle, — varies a few degrees, and does 
not always point due southwest, it is true, and it 
has good authority for this variation, but it al- 
ways settles between west and south-south-west. 
The future lies that way to me, and the earth 
seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. 
The outline which would bound my walks would 
be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one 
of those cometary orbits which have been thought 
to be non-returning curves, in this case opening 
westward, in which my house occupies the place 
of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute 
sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I de- 
cide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into 
the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by 
force ; but westward I go free. Thither no busi- 
ness leads me. It is hard for me to believe that 
I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness 
and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am 



WALKING 169 

not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; 
but I believe that the forest which I see in 
the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly 
toward the setting sun, and there are no towns 
nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb 
me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the 
city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leav- 
ing the city more and more, and withdrawing 
into the wilderness. I should not lay so much 
stress on this fact, if I did not believe that some- 
thing like this is the prevailing tendency of my 
countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and 
not toward Europe. And that way the nation is 
moving, and I may say that mankind progress 
from east to west. Within a few years we have 
witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward 
migration, in the settlement of Australia; but 
this affects us as a retrograde movement, and, 
judging from the moral and physical character 
of the first generation of Australians, has not 
yet proved a successful experiment. The east- 
ern Tartars think that there is nothing west be- 
yond Thibet. "The world ends there," say they, 
"beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea." 
It is unmitigated East where they live. 

We go eastward to realize history and study 
the works of art and literature, retracing the 
steps of the race; we go westward as into the 
future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. 
The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our pas- 



170 EXCURSIONS 

sage over which we have had an opportunity to 
forget the Old World and its institutions. If 
we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one 
more chance for the race left before it arrives 
on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe 
of the Pacific, which is three times as wide. 

I know not how significant it is, or how far it 
is an evidence of singularity, that an individual 
should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the 
general movement of the race; but I know that 
something akin to the migratory instinct in birds 
and quadrupeds, — which, in some instances, is 
known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impel- 
ling them to a general and mysterious move- 
ment, in which they were seen, say some, crossing 
the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, 
with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging nar- 
rower streams with their dead, — that something 
like the furor which affects the domestic cattle 
in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in 
their tails, — affects both nations and individuals, 
either perennially or from time to time. Not a 
flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it 
to some extent unsettles the value of real estate 
here, and, if I were a broker, I should probably 
take that disturbance into account. 

"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages, 
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes." 

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with 
the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair 



WALKING 171 

as that into which the sun goes down. He ap- 
pears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us 
to follow him. He is the Great Western Pio- 
neer whom the nations follow. We dream all 
night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, 
though they may be of vapor only, which were 
last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, 
and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, 
a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have 
been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped 
in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in 
imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, 
the gardens of the Hesperides, and the founda- 
tion of all those fables? 

Columbus felt the westward tendency more 
strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and 
found a New World for Castile and Leon. The 
herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures 
from afar. 

"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills, 
And now was dropped into the western bay; 
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue; 
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." 

Where on the globe can there be found an area 
of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk 
of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in 
its productions, and at the same time so habit- 
able by the European, as this is? Michaux, 
who knew but part of them, says that "the spe- 
cies of large trees are much more numerous in 



172 EXCURSIONS 

North America than in Europe; in the United 
States there are more than one hundred and 
forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; 
in France there are but thirty that attain this 
size." Later botanists more than confirm his 
observations. Humboldt came to America to 
realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegeta- 
tion, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection 
in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most 
gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so 
eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, 
himself a European, goes farther, — farther than 
I am ready to follow him ; yet not when he says, 
— "As the plant is made for the animal, as the 
vegetable world is made for the animal world, 
America is made for the man of the Old World. 
. . The man of the Old World sets out 
upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, 
he descends from station to station toward 
Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new 
civilization superior to the preceding, by a 
greater power of development. Arrived at the 
Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown 
ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and 
turns upon his footprints for an instant." When 
he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe, and 
reinvigorated himself, "then recommences his 
adventurous career westward as in the earliest 
ages." So far Guyot. 

From this western impulse coming in contact 



WALKING 173 

with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the com- 
merce and enterprise of modern times. The 
younger Michaux, in his "Travels West of the 
Alleghanies in 1802," says that the common in- 
quiry in the newly settled West was, 'From 
what part of the world have you come?' As if 
these vast and fertile regions would naturally be 
the place of meeting and common country of all 
the inhabitants of the globe." 

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, 
Eoo Oriente lux; ex Occidente mux. From the 
East light; from the West fruit. 

Sir Francis Head, an English traveller and a 
Governor- General of Canada, tells us that " in 
both the northern and southern hemispheres of 
the New World, Nature has not only outlined 
her works on a larger scale, but has painted the 
whole picture with brighter and more costly col- 
ors than she used in delineating and in beautify- 
ing the Old World. . . . The heavens of 
America appear infinitely higher, the sky is 
bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the 
moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the 
thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the 
wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the moun- 
tains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests 
bigger, the plains broader." This statement will 
do at least to set against Buffon's account of this 
part of the world and its productions. 

Linnaeus said long ago, "Nescio quae facies 



174 EXCURSIONS 

Iceta, glabra plantis Americanis: I know not 
what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect 
of American plants;" and I think that in this 
country there are no, or at most very few, Afri- 
cans bestice, African beasts, as the Romans 
called them, and that in this respect also it is 
peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man. We 
are told that within three miles of the centre of 
the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the 
inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; 
but the traveller can lie down in the woods at 
night almost anywhere in North America with- 
out fear of wild beasts. 

These are encouraging testimonies. If the 
moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably 
the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of 
America appear infinitely higher, and the stars 
brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical 
of the height to which the philosophy and poetry 
and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. 
At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will 
appear as much higher to the American mind, 
and the intimations that star it as much brighter. 
For I believe that climate does thus react on 
man, — as there is something in the mountain-air 
that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man 
grow to greater perfection intellectually as well 
as physically under these influences? Or is it 
unimportant how many foggy days there are in 
his life? I trust that we shall be more imagina- 



WALKING 175 

tive, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, 
and more ethereal, as our sky, — our understand- 
ing more comprehensive and broader, like our 
plains, — our intellect generally on a grander 
scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers 
and mountains and forests, — and our hearts shall 
even correspond in breadth and depth and gran- 
deur to our inland seas. Perchance there will 
appear to the traveller something, he knows not 
what, of Iceta and glabra, of joyous and serene, 
in our very faces. Else to what end does the 
world go on, and why was America discovered? 
To Americans I hardly need to say, — 

"Westward the star of empire takes its way." 

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think 
that Adam in paradise was more favorably situ- 
ated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this 
country. 

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not con- 
fined to New England; though we may be es- 
tranged from the South, we sympathize with the 
West. There is the home of the younger sons, 
as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea 
for their inheritance. It is too late to be study- 
ing Hebrew; it is more important to understand 
even the slang of to-day. 

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of 
the Rhine. It was like a dream of the Middle 
Ages. I floated down its historic stream in some- 



176 EXCURSIONS 

thing more than imagination, under bridges built 
by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes, 
past cities and castles whose very names were 
music to my ears, and each of which was the 
subject of a legend. There were Ehrenbreit- 
stein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I 
knew only in history. They were ruins that in- 
terested me chiefly. There seemed to come up 
from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys 
a hushed music as of Crusaders departing for 
the Holy Land. I floated along under the spell 
of enchantment, as if I had been transported to 
an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of 
chivalry. 

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the 
Mississippi, and as I worked my way up the 
river in the light of to-day, and saw the steam- 
boats wooding up, counted the rising cities, 
gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the 
Indians moving west across the stream, and, as 
before I had looked up the Moselle now looked 
up the Ohio and the Missouri, and heard the 
legends of Dubuque and of Wenona's cliff, — 
still thinking more of the future than of the past 
or present, — I saw that this was a Rhine stream 
of a different kind; that the foundations of 
castles were yet to be laid, and the famous 
bridges were yet to be thrown over the river ; and 
I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though 



WALKING 177 

we know it not, for the hero is commonly the 
simplest and obscurest of men. 

The West of which I speak is but another 
name for the Wild; and what I have been pre- 
paring to say is, that in Wildness is the preserva- 
tion of the World. Every tree sends its fibres 
forth in search of the Wild. The cities import 
it at any price. Men plough and sail for it. 
From the forest and wilderness come the tonics 
and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors 
were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus 
being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless 
fable. The founders of every State which has 
risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment 
and vigor from a similar wild source. It was be- 
cause the children of the Empire were not 
suckled by the wolf that they were conquered 
and displaced by the children of the Northern 
forests who were. 

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and 
in the night in which the corn grows. We re- 
quire an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor- 
vitse in our tea. There is a difference between 
eating and drinking for strength and from mere 
gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the 
marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, 
as a matter of course. Some of our Northern 
Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic rein- 



178 EXCURSIONS 

deer, as well as various other parts, including 
the summits of the antlers, as long as they are 
soft. And herein, perchance, they have stolen 
a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what 
usually goes to feed the fire. This is probably 
better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house 
pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness 
whose glance no civilization can endure, — as if 
we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw. 

There are some intervals which border the 
strain of the wood-thrush, to which I would mi- 
grate, — wild lands where no settler has squatted ; 
to which, methinks, I am already acclimated. 

The African hunter Curnmings tells us that 
the skin of the eland, as well as that of most other 
antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious 
perfume of trees and grass. I would have every 
man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part 
and parcel of Nature, that his very person should 
thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, 
and remind us of those parts of Nature which he 
most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, 
when the trapper's coat emits the odor of mus- 
quash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that 
which commonly exhales from the merchant's or 
the scholar's garments. When I go into their 
wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am re- 
minded of no grassy plains and flowery meads 
which they have frequented, but of dusty mer- 
chants' exchanges and libraries rather. 



WALKING 179 

A tanned skin is something more than respect- 
able, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white 
for a man, — a denizen of the woods. "The pale 
white man!" I do not wonder that the African 
pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says, "A white 
man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a 
plant bleached by the gardener's art, compared 
with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously 
in the open fields. " 

Ben Jonson exclaims, — 

"How near to good is what is fair!" 

So I would say, — 

How near to good is what is wild! 

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is 
the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its pres- 
ence refreshes him. One who pressed forward 
incessantly and never rested from his labors, who 
grew fast and made infinite demands on life, 
would always find himself in a new country or 
wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material 
of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate 
stems of primitive forest-trees. 

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns 
and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but 
in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, 
formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some 
farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I 
have frequently found that I was attracted solely 



180 EXCURSIONS 

by a few square rods of impermeable and un- 
fathomable bog, — a natural sink in one corner 
of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I 
derive more of my subsistence from the swamps 
which surround my native town than from the 
cultivated gardens in the village. There are 
no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense 
beds of dwarf andromeda (Cassandra calycu- 
lata) which cover these tender places on the 
earth's surface. Botany cannot go farther than 
tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there, 
— the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb- 
kill, azalea, and rhodora, — all standing in the 
quaking sphagnum. I often think that I should 
like to have my house front on this mass of dull 
red bushes, omitting other flower-pots and bor- 
ders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even 
gravelled walks, — to have this fertile spot under 
my windows, not a few imported barrowfuls 
of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown 
out in digging the cellar. Why not put my 
house, my parlor, behind this plot, instead of 
behind that meagre assemblage of curiosities, that 
poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call 
my front-yard? It is an effort to clear up and 
make a decent appearance when the carpenter 
and mason have departed, though done as much 
for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most 
tasteful front-yard fence was never an agree- 
able object of study to me; the most elaborate 



WALKING 181 

ornaments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied 
and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the 
very edge of the swamp, then (though it may not 
be the best place for a dry cellar), so that there 
be no access on that side to citizens. Front- 
yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, 
through, and you could go in the back way. 

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it 
were proposed to me to dwell in the neighbor- 
hood of the most beautiful garden that ever hu- 
man art contrived, or else of a Dismal swamp, I 
should certainly decide for the swamp. How 
vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, 
for me! 

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the 
outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the des- 
ert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air 
and solitude compensate for want of moisture 
and fertility. The traveller Burton says of it, — 
"Your morale improves; you become frank and 
cordial, hospitable and single-minded. . . . 
In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only dis- 
gust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere ani- 
mal existence." They who have been travelling 
long on the steppes of Tartary say, — "On re- 
entering cultivated lands, the agitation, per- 
plexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and 
suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we 
felt every moment as if about to die of as- 
phyxia." When I would recreate myself, I seek 



182 EXCURSIONS 

the darkest wood, the thickest and most inter- 
minable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. 
I enter a swamp as a sacred place, — a sanctum 
sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow 
of Nature. The wild-wood covers the virgin 
mould, — and the same soil is good for men and 
for trees. A man's health requires as many acres 
of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads 
of muck. There are the strong meats on which 
he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the 
righteous men in it than by the woods and 
swamps that surround it. A township where 
one primitive forest waves above, while another 
primitive forest rots below, — such a town is fit- 
ted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets 
and philosophers for the coming ages. In such 
a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, 
and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer 
eating locusts and wild honey. 

To preserve wild animals implies generally 
the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or 
resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years 
ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our 
own woods. In the very aspect of those primi- 
tive and rugged trees, there was, methinks, a 
tanning principle which hardened and consoli- 
dated the fibres of men's thoughts. Ah ! already 
I shudder for these comparatively degenerate 
days of my native village, when you cannot col- 



WALKING 183 

lect a load of bark of good thickness, — and we 
no longer produce tar and turpentine. 

The civilized nations — Greece, Rome, Eng- 
land — have been sustained by the primitive for- 
ests which anciently rotted where they stand. 
They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. 
Alas for human culture ! Little is to be expected 
of a nation, when the vegetable mould is ex- 
hausted, and it is compelled to make manure of 
the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains 
himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and 
the philosopher comes down on his marrow- 
bones. 

It is said to be the task of the American "to 
work the virgin soil," and that "agriculture here 
already assumes proportions unknown every- 
where else." I think that the farmer displaces 
the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, 
and so makes himself stronger and in some re- 
spects more natural. I was surveying for a man 
the other day a single straight line one hundred 
and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp, at 
whose entrance might have been written the 
words which Dante read over the entrance to 
the infernal regions, — "Leave all hope, ye that 
enter," — that is, of ever getting out again; where 
at one time I saw my employer actually up to his 
neck and swimming for his life in his property, 
though it was still winter. He had another simi- 



184 EXCURSIONS 

lar swamp which I could not survey at all, be- 
cause it was completely under water, and never- 
theless, with regard to a third swamp, which I 
did survey from a distance, he remarked to me, 
true to his instincts, that he would not part with 
it for any consideration, on account of the mud 
which it contained. And that man intends to 
put a girdling ditch round the whole in the 
course of forty months, and so redeem it by the 
magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the 
type of a class. 

The weapons with which we have gained our 
most important victories, which should be handed 
down as heirlooms from father to son, are not 
the sword and the lance, but the bushwhack, the 
turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted 
with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed 
with the dust of many a hard- fought field. The 
very winds blew the Indian's cornfield into the 
meadow, and pointed out the way which he had 
not the skill to follow. He had no better imple- 
ment with which to intrench himself in the land 
than a clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with 
plough and spade. 

In Literature it is only the wild that attracts 
us. Dulness is but another name for tameness. 
It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in 
"Hamlet" and the "Iliad," in all the Scriptures 
and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that 
delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and 







G 



WALKING 185 

beautiful than the tame, so is the wild — the mal- 
lard — thought, which 'mid falling dews wings 
its way above the fens. A truly good book is 
something as natural, and as unexpectedly and 
unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower 
discovered on the prairies of the West or in the 
jungles of the East. Genius is a light which 
makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's 
flash, which perchance shatters the temple of 
knowledge itself, — and not a taper lighted at the 
hearthstone of the race, which pales before the 
light of common day. 

English literature, from the days of the min- 
strels to the Lake Poets, — Chaucer and Spenser 
and Milton, and even Shakspeare, included — 
breathes no quite fresh and in this sense wild 
strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized 
literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her 
wilderness is a green wood,— her wild man a 
Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of 
Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her 
chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but 
not when the wild man in her, became extinct. 

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry 
is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstand- 
ing all the discoveries of science, and the accu- 
mulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advan- 
tage over Homer. 

Where is the literature which gives expres- 
sion to Nature ? He would be a poet who could 



186 EXCURSIONS 

impress the winds and streams into his service, 
to speak for him; who nailed words to their 
primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in 
the spring, which the frost has heaved; who de- 
rived his words as often as he used them, — trans- 
planted them to his page with earth adhering to 
their roots; whose words were so true and fresh 
and natural that they would appear to expand 
like the buds at the approach of spring, though 
they lay half-smothered between two musty 
leaves in a library, — ay, to bloom and bear fruit 
there, after their kind, annually, for the faith- 
ful reader, in sympathy with surrounding 
Nature. 

I do not know of any poetry to quote which 
adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. 
Approached from this side, the best poetry is 
tame. I do not know where to find in any litera- 
ture, ancient or modern, any account which con- 
tents me of that Nature with which even I am 
acquainted. You will perceive that I demand 
something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan 
age, which no culture,, in short, can give. Myth- 
ology comes nearer to it than anything. How 
much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian 
mythology its root in than English literature! 
Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore 
before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy 
and imagination were affected with blight; and 
which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is 



WALKING 187 

unabated. All other literatures endure only as 
the elms which overshadow our houses; but this 
is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, 
as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, 
will endure as long ; for the decay of other litera- 
tures makes the soil in which it thrives. 

The West is preparing to add its fables to 
those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, 
the Nile, and the Rhine, having yielded their 
crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of 
the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. 
Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Per- 
chance, when, in the course of ages, American 
liberty has become a fiction of the past, — as it is 
to some extent a fiction of the present, — the 
poets of the world will be inspired by American 
mythology. 

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not 
the less true, though they may not recommend 
themselves to the sense which is most common 
among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It 
is not every truth that recommends itself to the 
common sense. Nature has a place for the wild 
clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some ex- 
pressions of truth are reminiscent, — others mere- 
ly sensible,, as the phrase is, — others prophetic. 
Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy 
forms of health. The geologist has discovered 
that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying drag- 
ons, and other fanciful embellishments of her- 



188 EXCURSIONS 

aldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fos- 
sil species which were extinct before man was 
created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy 
knowledge of a previous state of organic exist- 
ence." The Hindoos dreamed that the earth 
rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a 
tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and 
though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it 
will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil 
tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large 
enough to support an elephant. I confess that 
I am partial to these wild fancies, which tran- 
scend the order of time and development. They 
are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The 
partridge loves peas, but not those that go with 
her into the pot. 

In short, all good things are wild and free. 
There is something in a strain of music, whether 
produced by an instrument or by the human 
voice, — take the sound of a bugle in a summer 
night, for instance, — which by its wildness, to 
speak without satire, reminds me of the cries 
emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. 
It is so much of their wildness as I can under- 
stand. Give me for my friends and neighbors 
wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the 
savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity 
with which good men and lovers meet. 

I love even to see the domestic animals reas- 
sert their native rights,- — any evidence that they 



WALKING 189 

have not wholly lost their original wild habits 
and vigor ; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out 
of her pasture early in the spring and boldly 
swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five 
or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. 
It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This 
exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my 
eyes, — already dignified. The seeds of instinct 
are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and 
horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an 
indefinite period. 

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I 
saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows 
running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, 
like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook 
their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and 
down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as 
well as by their activity, their relation to the deer 
tribe. But, alas! a sudden loud Whoa! would 
have damped their ardor at once, reduced them 
from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides 
and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the 
Evil One has cried, "Whoa!" to mankind? In- 
deed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, 
is but a sort of locomotiveness ; they move a side 
at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting 
the horse and the ox half-way. Whatever part 
the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who 
would ever think of a side of any of the supple 
cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef? 



190 EXCURSIONS 

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be 
broken before they can be made the slaves of 
men, and that men themselves have some wild 
oats still left to sow before they become submis- 
sive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men 
are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and 
because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are 
tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason 
why the others should have their natures broken 
that they may be reduced to the same level. Men 
are in the main alike, but they were made several 
in order that they might be various. If a low 
use is to be served, one man will do nearly or 
quite as well as another ; if a high one, individual 
excellence is to be regarded. Any man can stop 
a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man 
could serve so rare a use as the author of this 
illustration did. Confucius says, — "The skins of 
the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, 
are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned.'' 
But it is not the part of a true culture to tame 
tigers, any more than it is to make sheep feroci- 
ous; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the 
best use to which they can be put. 

When looking over a list of men's names in a 
foreign language, as of military officers, or of 
authors who have written on a particular sub- 
ject, I am reminded once more that there is 
nothing in a name. The name MenschikofF, for 



WALKING 191 

instance, has nothing in it to my ears more 
human than a whisker, and it may belong to a 
rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians 
are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had 
been named by the child's rigmarole, — lery 
wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan. I see in my 
mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the 
earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some 
barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names 
of men are of course as cheap and meaningless 
as Bose and Tray, the names of dogs. 

Methinks it would be some advantage to phi- 
losophy, if men were named merely in the gross, 
as they are known. It would be necessary only 
to know the genus and perhaps the race or va- 
riety, to know the individual. We are not pre- 
pared to believe that every private soldier in a 
Roman army had a name of his own, — because 
we have not supposed that he had a character of 
his own. At present our only true names are 
nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his peculiar 
energy, was called "Buster" by his playmates, 
and this rightly supplanted his Christian name. 
Some travellers tell us that an Indian had no 
name given him at first, but earned it, and his 
name was his fame; and among some tribes he 
acquired a new name with every new exploit. It 
is pitiful when a man bears a name for conven- 
ience merely, who has earned neither name nor 
fame. 



192 EXCURSIONS 

I will not allow mere names to make distinc- 
tions for me, but still see men in herds for all 
them. A familiar name cannot make a man less 
strange to me. It may be given to a savage who 
retains in secret his own wild title earned in the 
woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a sav- 
age name is perchance somewhere recorded as 
ours. I see that my neighbor, who bears the fa- 
miliar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it off 
with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when 
asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or 
inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some 
of his kin at such a time his original wild name in 
some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue. 

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of 
ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, 
and such affection for her children, as the leop- 
ard; and yet we are so early weaned from her 
breast to society, to that culture which is exclu- 
sively an interaction of man on man, — a sort of 
breeding in and in, which produces at most a 
merely English nobility, a civilization destined 
to have a speedy limit. 

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is 
easy to detect a certain precocity. When we 
should still be growing children, we are already 
little men. Give me a culture which imports 
much muck from the meadows, and deepens the 
soil, — not that which trusts to heating manures, 



WALKING 193 

and improved implements and modes of culture 
only ! 

Many a poor, sore-eyed student that I have 
heard of would grow faster, both intellectually 
and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very 
late, he honestlv slumbered a fool's allowance. 

There may be an excess even of informing 
light. Niepce, a Frenchman, discovered "actin- 
ism," that power in the sun's rays which produces 
a chemical effect, — that granite rocks, and stone 
structures, and statues of metal, "are all alike 
destructively acted upon during the hours of 
sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no 
less wonderful, would soon perish under the 
delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies 
of the universe." But he observed that "those 
bodies which underwent this change during the 
daylight possessed the power of restoring them- 
selves to their original conditions during the, 
hours of night, when this excitement was no 
longer influencing them." Hence it has been 
inferred that "the hours of darkness are as neces- 
sary to the inorganic creation as we know night 
and sleep are to the organic kingdom." Not 
even does the moon shine every night, but gives 
place to darkness. 

I would not have every man nor every part of 
a man cultivated, any more than I would have 
every acre of earth cultivated: part will be till- 
age, but the greater part will be meadow and 



194 EXCURSIONS 

forest, not only serving an immediate use, but 
preparing a mould against a distant future, by 
the annual decay of the vegetation which it sup- 
ports. 

There are other letters for the child to learn 
than those which Cadmus invented. The Span- 
iards have a good term to express this wild and 
dusky knowledge — Gramdtica parda, tawny 
grammar, — a kind of mother-wit derived from 
that same leopard to which I have referred. 

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion 
of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowl- 
edge is power; and the like. Methinks there is 
equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Use- 
ful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful 
Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher 
sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called 
knowledge but a conceit that we know some- 
thing, which robs us of the advantage of our 
actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is 
often our positive ignorance; ignorance our 
negative knowledge. By long years of patient 
industry and reading of the newspapers, — for 
what are the libraries of science but files of news- 
papers? — a man accumulates a myriad facts, 
lays them up in his memory, and then when in 
some spring of his life he saunters abroad into 
the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, 
goes to grass like a horse, and leaves all his 
harness behind in the stable. I would say to the 



WALKING 195 

Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 
sometimes, — Go to grass. You have eaten hay 
long enough. The spring has come with its 
green crop. The very cows are driven to their 
country pastures before the end of May ; though 
I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept 
his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the 
year round. So, frequently, the Society for the 
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle. 

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only use- 
ful, but beautiful, — while his knowledge, so 
called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides 
being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with, 
— he who knows nothing about a subject, and, 
what is extremely rare, knows that he knows 
nothing, or he who really knows something about 
it, but thinks that he knows all ? 

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but 
my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres un- 
known to my feet is perennial and constant. The 
highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, 
but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know 
that this higher knowledge amounts to anything 
more definite than a novel and grand surprise on 
a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that 
we called Knowledge before, — a discovery that 
there are more things in heaven and earth than 
are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the light- 
ing up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot 
know in any higher sense than this, any more 



196 EXCURSIONS 

than he can look serenely and with impunity in 

the face of sun: % Qq tI votiv, ou xslvov voTjaecc;, — "You 
will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular 
thing," say the Chaldean Oracles. 

There is something servile in the habit of seek- 
ing after a law which we may obey. We may 
study the laws of matter at and for our con- 
venience, but a successful life knows no law. It 
is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a 
law which binds us where we did not know be- 
fore that we were bound. Live free, child of the 
mist, — and with respect to knowledge we are all 
children of the mist. The man who takes the 
liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by 
virtue of his relation to the law-maker. "That 
is active duty," says the Vishnu Pur ana, "which 
is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which 
is for our liberation : all other duty is good only 
unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the 
cleverness of an artist." 

It is remarkable how few events or crises there 
are in our histories ; how little exercised we have 
been in our minds ; how few experiences we have 
had. I would fain be assured that I am growing 
apace and rankly, though my very growth dis- 
turb this dull equanimity, — though it be with 
struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or 
seasons of gloom. It would be well, if all our 
lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this 



WALKING 197 

trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and 
others, appear to have been exercised in their 
minds more than we: they were subjected to a 
kind of culture such as our district schools and 
colleges do not contemplate. Even Mahomet, 
though many may scream at his name, had a 
good deal more to live for, ay, and to die for, 
than they have commonly. 

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits 
one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad, 
then indeed the cars go by without his hearing 
them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our 
life goes by and the cars return. 

"Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen, 
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms, 
Traveller of the windy glens, 
Why hast thou left my ear so soon?" 

While almost all men feel an attraction draw- 
ing them to society, few are attracted strongly to 
Nature. In their relation to Nature men appear 
to me for the most part, notwithstanding their 
arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a 
beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. 
How little appreciation of the beauty of the 
landscape there is among us! We have to be 
told that the Greeks called the world K6a[Loq f 
beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why 
they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curi- 
ous philological fact. 

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature 



198 EXCURSIONS 

I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a 
world into which I make occasional and transi- 
tional and transient forays only, and my patri- 
otism and allegiance to the State into whose ter- 
ritories I seem to retreat are those of a moss- 
trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I 
would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp 
through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no 
moon nor firefly has shown me the causeway 
to it. Nature is a personality so vast and uni- 
versal that we have never seen one of her feat- 
ures. The walker in the familiar fields which 
stretch around my native town sometimes finds 
himself in another land than is described in their 
owners' deeds, as it were in some far-away field 
on the confines of the actual Concord, where her 
jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word 
Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These 
farms which I have myself surveyed, these 
bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still 
as through a mist ; but they have no chemistry to 
fix them ; they fade from the surface of the glass ; 
and the picture which the painter painted stands 
out dimly from beneath. The world with which 
we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and 
it will have no anniversary. 

I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other 
afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the 
opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden 
rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into 



WALKING 199 

some noble hall. I was impressed as if some 
ancient and altogether admirable and shining 
family had settled there in that part of the land 
called Concord, unknown to me, — to whom the 
sun was servant, — who had not gone into society 
in the village, — who had not been called on. I 
saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond 
through the wood, in Spaulding's cranberry- 
meadow. The pines furnished them with gables 
as they grew. Their house was not obvious to 
vision ; the trees grew through it. I do not know 
whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hi- 
larity or not. They seemed to recline on the sun- 
beams. They have sons and daughters. They 
are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which 
leads directly through their hall, does not in the 
least put them out, — as the muddy bottom of a 
pool is sometimes seen through the reflected 
skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do 
not know that he is their neighbor, — notwith- 
standing I heard him whistle as he drove his 
team through the house. Nothing can equal the 
serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is 
simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines 
and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the 
trees. They are of no politics. There was no 
noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were 
weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when 
the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the 
finest imaginable sweet musical hum, — as of a 



200 EXCURSIONS 

distant hive in May, which perchance was the 
sound of their thinking. They had no idle 
thoughts, and no one without could see their 
work, for their industry was not as in knots and 
excrescences embayed. 

But I find it difficult to remember them. 
They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now 
while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and 
recollect myself. It is only after a long and seri- 
ous effort to recollect my best thoughts that I 
become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it 
were not for such families as this, I think I 
should move out of Concord. 

We are accustomed to say in New England 
that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. 
Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it 
would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each 
growing man from year to year, for the grove 
in our minds is laid waste, — sold to feed unneces- 
sary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is 
scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They 
no longer build nor breed with us. In some more 
genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits 
across the landscape of the mind, cast by the 
wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal 
migration, but, looking up, we are unable to 
detect the substance of the thought itself. Our 
winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They 
no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shang- 



WALKING 201 

hai and Cochin- China grandeur. Those gra-a- 
ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of! 

We hug the earth, — how rarely we mount! 
Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little 
more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found 
my account in climbing a tree once. It was a 
tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though 
I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I 
discovered new mountains in the horizon which 
I had never seen before, — so much more of the 
earth and the heavens. I might have walked 
about the foot of the tree for threescore years 
and ten, yet I certainly should never have seen 
them. But, above all, I discovered around me, 
— it was near the end of June, — on the ends of 
the topmost branches only, a few minute and 
delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower 
of the white pine looking heavenward. I carried 
straightway to the village the topmost spire, and 
showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the 
streets, — for it was court-week, — and to farmers 
and lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and 
hunters, and not one had ever seen the like be- 
fore, but they wondered as at a star dropped 
down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their 
works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on 
the lower and more visible parts! Nature has 
from the first expanded the minute blossoms of 
the forest only toward the heavens, above men's 



202 EXCURSIONS 

heads and unobserved by them. We see only the 
flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. 
The pines have developed their delicate blossoms 
on the highest twigs of the wood every summer 
for ages, as well over the heads of Nature's red 
children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a 
farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them. 

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the 
present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses 
no moment of the passing life in remembering 
the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock 
crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is 
belated. That sound commonly reminds us that 
we are growing rusty and antique in our employ- 
ments and habits of thought. His philosophy 
comes down to a more recent time than ours. 
There is something suggested by it that is a 
newer testament, — the gospel according to this 
moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got 
up early, and kept up early, and to be where he 
is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. 
It is an expression of the health and soundness 
of Nature, a brag for all the world, — healthiness 
as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the 
Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time; 
Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. 
Who has not betrayed his master many times 
since last he heard that note? 

The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom 







^ 
k 



u 



>*1 



WALKING 203 

from all plaintiveness. The singer can easily 
move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he 
who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, 
in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of 
our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, 
a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a 
cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, 
"There is one of us well, at any rate," — and with 
a sudden gush return to my senses. 

We had a remarkable sunset one day last No- 
vember. I was walking in a meadow, the source 
of a small brook, when the sun at last, just be- 
fore setting, after a cold gray day, reached a 
clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, 
brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass 
and on the stems of the trees in the opposite 
horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on 
the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long 
over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only 
motes in its beams. It was such a light as we 
could not have imagined a moment before, and 
the air also was so warm and serene that noth- 
ing was wanting to make a paradise of that 
meadow. When we reflected that this was not 
a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, 
but that it would happen forever and ever an in- 
finite number of evenings, and cheer and reas- 
sure the latest child that walked there, it was 
more glorious still. 



204 EXCURSIONS 

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where 
no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor 
that it lavishes on cities, and perchance, as it has 
never set before, — where there is but a solitary 
marsh-hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or 
only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and 
there is some little black-veined brook in the 
midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, 
winding slowly round a decaying stump. We 
walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the 
withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely 
bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a 
golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. 
The west side of every wood and rising ground 
gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the 
sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman 
driving us home at evening. 

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one 
day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever 
he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds 
and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a 
great awakening light, as warm and serene and 
golden as on a bank-side in autumn. 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 

[1862] 

EUROPEANS coming to America are sur- 
prised by the brilliancy of our autumnal 
foliage. There is no account of such a 
phenomenon in English poetry, because the trees 
acquire but few bright colors there. The most 
that Thomson says on this subject in his "Au- 
tumn" is contained in the lines, — 

"But see the fading many-colored woods, 
Shade deepening over shade, the country round 
Imbrown; a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun, 
Of every hue, from wan declining green to sooty dark": — 

and in the line in which he speaks of 

"Autumn beaming o'er the yellow woods." 

The autumnal change of our woods has not 
made a deep impression on our own literature 
yet. October has hardly tinged our poetry. 

A great many, who have spent their lives in 
cities, and have never chanced to come into the 
country at this season, have never seen this, the 
flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year. I 
remember riding with one such citizen, who, 
though a fortnight too late for the most brilliant 

205 



206 EXCURSIONS 

tints, was taken by surprise, and would not be- 
lieve that there had been any brighter. He had 
never heard of this phenomenon before. Not 
only many in our towns have never witnessed it, 
but it is scarcely remembered by the majority 
from year to year. 

Most appear to confound changed leaves with 
withered ones, as if they were to confound ripe 
apples with rotten ones. I think that the change 
to some higher color in a leaf is an evidence that 
it has arrived at a late and perfect maturity, 
answering to the maturity of fruits. It is gen- 
erally the lowest and oldest leaves which change 
first. But as the perfect winged and usually 
bright-colored insect is short-lived, so the leaves 
ripen but to fall. 

Generally, every fruit, on ripening, and just 
before it falls, when it commences a more inde- 
pendent and individual existence, requiring less 
nourishment from any source, and that not so 
much from the earth through its stem as from 
the sun and air, acquires a bright tint. So do 
leaves. The physiologist says it is "due to an 
increased absorption of oxygen." That is the 
scientific account of the matter, — only a reas- 
sertion of the fact. But I am more interested 
in the rosy cheek than I am to know what par- 
ticular diet the maiden fed on. The very forest 
and herbage, the pellicle of the earth, must ac- 
quire a bright color, an evidence of its ripeness, 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 207 

— as if the globe itself were a fruit on its stem, 
with ever a cheek toward the sun. 

Flowers are but colored leaves, fruits but ripe 
ones. The edible part of most fruits is, as the 
physiologist says, "the parenchyma or fleshy tis- 
sue of the leaf," of which they are formed. 

Our appetites have commonly confined our 
views of ripeness and its phenomena, color, mel- 
lowness, and perfectness, to the fruits which we 
eat, and we are wont to forget that an immense 
harvest which we do not eat, hardly use at all, 
is annually ripened by Nature. At our annual 
Cattle Shows and Horticultural Exhibitions, we 
make, as we think, a great show of fair fruits, 
destined, however, to a rather ignoble end, fruits 
not valued for their beauty chiefly. But round 
about and within our towns there is annually an- 
other show of fruits, on an infinitely grander 
scale, fruits which address our taste for beauty 
alone. 

October is the month for painted leaves. Their 
rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits 
and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint 
just before they fall, so the year near its setting. 
October is its sunset sky; November the later 
twilight. 

I formerly thought that it would be worth the 
while to get a specimen leaf from each changing 
tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant, when it had 
acquired its brightest characteristic color, in its 



208 EXCURSIONS 

transition from the green to the brown state, out- 
line it, and copy its color exactly, with paint in a 
book, which should be entitled, ''October, or 
Autumnal tints"; — beginning with the earliest 
reddening, — Woodbine and the lake of radical 
leaves, and coming down through the Maples, 
Hickories, and Sumachs, and many beautifully 
freckled leaves less generally known, to the latest 
Oaks and Aspens. What a memento such a book 
would be ! You would need only to turn over its 
leaves to take a ramble through the autumn 
woods whenever you pleased. Or if I could pre- 
serve the leaves themselves, unf aded, it would be 
better still. I have made but little progress 
toward such a book, but I have endeavored, in- 
stead, to describe all these bright tints in the 
order in which they present themselves. The 
following are some extracts from my notes. 

THE PURPLE GRASSES 

By the twentieth of August, everywhere in 
woods and swamps, we are reminded of the fall, 
both by the richly spotted Sarsaparilla-leaves 
and Brakes, and the withering and blackened 
Skunk- Cabbage and Hellebore, and, by the 
river-side, the already blackening Pontederia. 

The Purple Grass (Eragrdstis pectindcea) is 
now in the height of its beauty. I remember still 
when I first noticed this grass particularly. 
Standing on a hill-side near our river, I saw, 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 209 

thirty or forty rods off, a stripe of purple half a 
dozen rods long, under the edge of a wood, where 
the ground sloped toward a meadow. It was as 
high-colored and interesting, though not quite so 
bright, as the patches of Rhexia, being a darker 
purple, like a berry's stain laid on close and 
thick. On going to and examining it, I found 
it to be a kind of grass in bloom, hardly a foot 
high, with but few green blades, and a fine 
spreading panicle of purple flowers, a shallow, 
purplish mist trembling around me. Close at 
hand it appeared but a dull purple, and made 
little impression on the eye; it was even difficult 
to detect ; and if you plucked a single plant, you 
were surprised to find how thin it was, and how 
little color it had. But viewed at a distance in 
a favorable light, it was of a fine lively purple, 
flower-like, enriching the earth. Such puny 
causes combine to produce these decided effects. 
I was the more surprised and charmed because 
grass is commonly of a sober and humble color. 
With its beautiful purple blush it reminds me, 
and supplies the place, of the Rhexia, which is 
now leaving off, and it is one of the most inter- 
esting phenomena of August. The finest patches 
of it grow on waste strips or selvages of land at 
the base of dry hills, just above the edge of the 
meadows, where the greedy mower does not 
deign to swing his scythe; for this is a thin and 
poor grass, beneath his notice. Or, it may be, 



210 EXCURSIONS 

because it is so beautiful he does not know that it 
exists; for the same eye does not see this and 
Timothy. He carefully gets the meadow hay 
and the more nutritious grasses which grow next 
to that, but he leaves this fine purple mist for the 
walker's harvest, — fodder for his fancy stock. 
Higher up the hill, perchance, grow also Black- 
berries, John's- Wort, and neglected, withered, 
and wiry June-Grass. How fortunate that it 
grows in such places, and not in the midst of the 
rank grasses which are annually cut! Nature 
thus keeps use and beauty distinct. I know many 
such localities, where it does not fail to present 
itself annually, and paint the earth with its blush. 
It grows on the gentle slopes either in a continu- 
ous patch or in scattered and rounded tufts a 
foot in diameter, and it lasts till it is killed by 
the first smart frosts. 

In most plants the corolla or calyx is the part 
which attains the highest color, and is the most 
attractive; in many it is the seed-vessel or fruit; 
in others, as the Red Maple, the leaves; and in 
others still it is the very culm itself which is the 
principal flower or blooming part. 

The last is especially the case with the Poke 
or Garget (Phytolacca decdndra) . Some which 
stand under our cliffs quite dazzle me with their 
purple stems now and early in September. They 
are as interesting to me as most flowers, and one 
of the most important fruits of our autumn. 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 211 

Every part is flower, (or fruit,) such is its super- 
fluity of color, — stem, branch, peduncle, pedicel, 
petiole, and even the at length yellowish purple- 
veined leaves. Its cylindrical racemes of berries 
of various hues, from green to dark purple, six 
or seven inches long, are gracefully drooping on 
all sides, offering repasts to the birds; and even 
the sepals from which the birds have picked the 
berries are a brilliant lake-red, with crimson 
flame-like reflections, equal to anything of the 
kind, — all on fire with ripeness. Hence the 
lacca, from lac, lake. There are at the same 
time flower-buds, flowers, green berries, dark 
purple or ripe ones, and these flower-like sepals, 
all on the same plant. 

We love to see any redness in the vegetation of 
the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. 
This plant speaks to our blood. It asks a bright 
sun on it to make it show to best advantage, 
and it must be seen at this season of the year. On 
warm hill- sides its stems are ripe by the twenty- 
third of August. At that date I walked through 
a beautiful grove of them, six or seven feet high, 
on the side of one of our cliffs, where they ripen 
early. Quite to the ground they were a deep 
brilliant purple with a bloom, contrasting with 
the still clear green leaves. It appears a rare 
triumph of Nature to have produced and per- 
fected such a plant, as if this were enough for a 
summer. What a perfect maturity it arrives at! 



212 EXCURSIONS 

It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by 
a death not premature, which is an ornament to 
Nature. What if we were to mature as per- 
fectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of 
our decay, like the Poke! I confess that it ex- 
cites me to behold them. I cut one for a cane, 
for I would fain handle and lean on it. I love 
to press the berries between my fingers, and see 
their juice staining my hand. To walk amid 
these upright, branching casks of purple wine, 
which retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tasting 
each one with your eye, instead of counting 
the pipes on a London dock, what a privilege! 
For Nature's vintage is not confined to the vine. 
Our poets have sung of wine, the product of a 
foreign plant which commonly they never saw, 
as if our own plants had no juice in them more 
than the singers. Indeed, this has been called 
by some the American Grape, and, though a 
native of America, its juices are used in some 
foreign countries to improve the color of the 
wine; so that the poetaster may be celebrating 
the virtues of the Poke without knowing it. 
Here are berries enough to paint afresh the 
western sky, and play the bacchanal with, if you 
will. And what flutes its ensanguined stems 
would make, to be used in such a dance! It is 
truly a royal plant. I could spend the evening 
of the year musing amid the Poke-stems. And 
perchance amid these groves might arise at last 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 213 

a new school of philosophy or poetry. It lasts 
all through September. 

At the same time with this, or near the end 
of August, a to me very interesting genus of 
grasses, Andropogons, or Beard-Grasses, is in 
its prime. Andropogon furcatus, Forked Beard- 
Grass, or call it Purple-Fingered Grass ; Andro- 
pogon scoparius, Purple Wood- Grass; and 
Andropogon (now called Sorghum) nutans, 
Indian- Grass. The first is a very tall and slen- 
der culmed grass, three to seven feet high, 
with four or five purple finger-like spikes ray- 
ing upward from the top. The second is also 
quite slender, growing in tufts two feet high by 
one wide, with culms often somewhat curving, 
which, as the spikes go out of bloom, have a 
whitish fuzzy look. These two are prevailing 
grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields 
and hill-sides. The culms of both, not to mention 
their pretty flowers, reflect a purple tinge, and 
help to declare the ripeness of the year. Perhaps 
I have the more sympathy with them because 
they are despised by the farmer, and occupy ster- 
ile and neglected soil. They are high-colored, 
like ripe grapes, and express a maturity which 
the spring did not suggest. Only the August 
sun could have thus burnished these culms and 
leaves. The farmer has long since done his up- 
land haying, and he will not condescend to bring 
his scythe to where these slender wild grasses 



214 EXCURSIONS 

have at length flowered thinly; you often see 
spaces of bare sand amid them. But I walk 
encouraged between the tufts of Purple Wood- 
Grass, over the sandy fields, and along the 
edge of the Shrub-Oaks, glad to recognize these 
simple contemporaries. With thoughts cutting 
a broad swathe I "get" them, with horse-raking 
thoughts I gather them into windrows. The 
fine-eared poet may hear the whetting of my 
scythe. These two were almost the first grasses 
that I learned to distinguish, for I had not 
known by how many friends I was surrounded, 
— I had seen them simply as grasses standing. 
The purple of their culms also excites me like 
that of the Poke- Weed stems. 

Think what refuge there is for one, before 
August is over, from college commencements 
and society that isolates! I can skulk amid the 
tufts of Purple Wood- Grass on the borders of 
the "Great Fields." Wherever I walk these 
afternoons, the Purple-Fingered Grass also 
stands like a guide-board, and points my 
thoughts to more poetic paths than they have 
lately travelled. 

A man shall perhaps rush by and trample down 
plants as high as his head, and cannot be said to 
know that they exist, though he may have cut 
many tons of them, littered his stables with 
them, and fed them to his cattle for years. 
Yet, if he ever favorably attends to them, he 




The farmer with his scythe 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 215 

may be overcome by their beauty. Each hum- 
blest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there 
to express some thought or mood of ours; 
and yet how long it stands in vain! I had 
walked over those Great Fields so many Au- 
gusts, and never yet distinctly recognized these 
purple companions that I had there. I had 
brushed against them and trodden on them, for- 
sooth; and now, at last, they, as it were, rose 
up and blessed me. Beauty and true wealth are 
always thus cheap and despised. Heaven might 
be defined as the place which men avoid. Who 
can doubt that these grasses, which the farmer 
says are of no account to him, find some compen- 
sation in your appreciation of them? I may say 
that I never saw them before, — though, when I 
came to look them face to face, there did come 
down to me a purple gleam from previous years ; 
and now, wherever I go, I see hardly anything 
else. It is the reign and presidency of the An- 
dropogons. 

Almost the very sands confess the ripening 
influence of the August sun, and methinks, to- 
gether with the slender grasses waving over 
them, reflect a purple tinge. The impurpled 
sands! Such is the consequence of all this sun- 
shine absorbed into the pores of plants and of 
the earth. All sap or blood is now wine-colored. 
At last we have not only the purple sea, but the 
purple land. 



216 EXCURSIONS 

The Chestnut Beard-Grass, Indian-Grass, or 
Wood- Grass, growing here and there in waste 
places, but more rare than the former, (from 
two to four or five feet high,) is still handsomer 
and of more vivid colors than its congeners, and 
might well have caught the Indian's eye. It has 
a long, narrow, one-sided, and slightly nodding 
panicle of bright purple and yellow flowers, like 
a banner raised above its reedy leaves. These 
bright standards are now advanced on the dis- 
tant hill-sides, not in large armies, but in scat- 
tered troops or single file, like the red men. They 
stand thus fair and bright, representative of the 
race which they are named after, but for the 
most part unobserved as they. The expression 
of this grass haunted me for a week, after I first 
passed and noticed it, like the glance of an eye. 
It stands like an Indian chief taking a last look 
at his favorite hunting-grounds. 

THE RED MAPLE 

By the twenty-fifth of September, the Red 
Maples generally are beginning to be ripe. 
Some large ones have been conspicuously chang- 
ing for a week, and some single trees are now 
very brilliant. I notice a small one, half a mile 
off across a meadow, against the green wood- 
side there, a far brighter red than the blossoms 
of any tree in summer, and more conspicuous. 
I have observed this tree for several autumns 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 217 

invariably changing earlier than its fellows, just 
as one tree ripens its fruit earlier than another. 
It might serve to mark the season, perhaps. I 
should be sorry, if it were cut down. I know 
of two or three such trees in different parts of 
our town, which might, perhaps, be propagated 
from, as early ripeners or September trees, and 
their seed be advertised in the market, as well as 
that of radishes, if we cared as much about them. 

At present these burning bushes stand chiefly 
along the edge of the meadows, or I distinguish 
them afar on the hill-sides here and there. Some- 
times you will see many small ones in a swamp 
turned quite crimson when all other trees around 
are still perfectly green, and the former appear 
so much the brighter for it. They take you by 
surprise, as you are going by on one side, across 
the fields, thus early in the season, as if it were 
some gay encampment of the red men, or other 
foresters, of whose arrival you had not heard. 

Some single trees, wholly bright scarlet, seen 
against others of their kind still freshly green, 
or against evergreens, are more memorable than 
whole groves will be by-and-by. How beauti- 
ful, when a whole tree is like one great scarlet 
fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from lowest 
limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you 
look toward the sun! What more remarkable 
object can there be in the landscape? Visible 
for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phe- 



218 EXCURSIONS 

nomenon occurred but once, it would be handed 
down by tradition to posterity, and get into the 
mythology at last. 

The whole tree thus ripening in advance of its 
fellows attains a singular preeminence, and some- 
times maintains it for a week or two. I am 
thrilled at the sight of it, bearing aloft its scarlet 
standard for the regiment of green-clad foresters 
around, and I go half a mile out of my way to 
examine it. A single tree becomes thus the 
crowning beauty of some meadowy vale, and the 
expression of the whole surrounding forest is at 
once more spirited for it. 

A small Red Maple has grown, perchance, far 
away at the head of some retired valley, a mile 
from any road, unobserved. It has faithfully 
discharged the duties of a Maple there, all win- 
ter and summer, neglected none of its economies, 
but added to its stature in the virtue which be- 
longs to a Maple, by a steady growth for so many 
months, never having gone gadding abroad, and 
is nearer heaven than it was in the spring. It 
has faithfully husbanded its sap, and afforded 
a shelter to the wandering bird, has long since 
ripened its seeds and committed them to the 
winds, and has the satisfaction of knowing, per- 
haps, that a thousand little well-behaved Maples 
are already settled in life somewhere. It de- 
serves well of Mapledom. Its leaves have been 
asking it from time to time, in a whisper, "When 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 219 

shall we redden?" And now, in this month of 
September, this month of travelling, when men 
are hastening to the sea-side, or the mountains, 
or the lakes, this modest Maple, still without 
budging an inch, travels in its reputation, — runs 
up its scarlet flag on that hill-side, which shows 
that it has finished its summer's work before all 
other trees, and withdraws from the contest. At 
the eleventh hour of the year, the tree which no 
scrutiny could have detected here when it was 
most industrious is thus, by the tint of its ma- 
turity, by its very blushes, revealed at last to the 
careless and distant traveller, and leads his 
thoughts away from the dusty road into those 
brave solitudes which it inhabits. It flashes out 
conspicuous with all the virtue and beauty of a 
Maple, — Acer rubrum. We may now read its 
title, or rubric, clear. Its virtues, not its sins, 
are as scarlet. 

Notwithstanding the Red Maple is the most 
intense scarlet of any of our trees, the Sugar- 
Maple has been the most celebrated, and 
Michaux in his "Sylva" does not speak of the 
autumnal color of the former. About the second 
of October, these trees, both large and small, are 
most brilliant, though many are still green. In 
"sprout-lands" they seem to vie with one another, 
and ever some particular one in the midst of the 
crowd will be of a peculiarly pure scarlet, and 
by its more intense color attract our eye even at 



220 EXCURSIONS 

a distance, and carry off the palm. A large 
Red-Maple swamp, when at the height of its 
change, is the most obviously brilliant of all tan- 
gible things, where I dwell, so abundant is this 
tree with us. It varies much both in form and 
color. A great many are merely yellow, more 
scarlet, others scarlet deepening into crimson, 
more red than common. Look at yonder swamp 
of Maples mixed with Pines, at the base of a 
Pine-clad hill, a quarter of a mile off, so that you 
get the full effect of the bright colors, without 
detecting the imperfections of the leaves, and 
see their yellow, scarlet, and crimson fires, of all 
tints, mingled and contrasted with the green. 
Some Maples are yet green, only yellow or 
crimson-tipped on the edges of their flakes, like 
the edges of a Hazel-Nut burr; some are wholly 
brilliant scarlet, raying out regularly and finely 
every way, bilaterally, like the veins of a leaf; 
others, of more irregular form, when I turn my 
head slightly, emptying out some of its earthi- 
ness and concealing the trunk of the tree, seem 
to rest heavily flake on flake, like yellow and 
scarlet clouds, wreath upon wreath, or like snow- 
drifts driving through the air, stratified by the 
wind. It adds greatly to the beauty of such a 
swamp at this season, that, even though there 
may be no other trees interspersed, it is not seen 
as a simple mass of color, but, different trees 
being of different colors and hues, the outline 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 221 

of each crescent tree-top is distinct, and where 
one laps on to another. Yet a painter would 
hardly venture to make them thus distinct a 
quarter of a mile off. 

As I go across the meadow directly toward a 
low rising ground this bright afternoon, I see, 
some fifty rods off toward the sun, the top of a 
Maple swamp just appearing over the sheeny 
russet edge of the hill, a stripe apparently twenty 
rods long by ten feet deep, of the most intensely 
brilliant scarlet, orange, and yellow, equal to any 
flowers or fruits, or any tints ever painted. As 
I advance, lowering the edge of the hill which 
makes the firm foreground or lower frame of the 
picture, the depth of the brilliant grove revealed 
steadily increases, suggesting that the whole of 
the inclosed valley is filled with such color. One 
wonders that the tithing-men and fathers of the 
town are not out to see what the trees mean by 
their high colors and exuberance of spirits, fear- 
ing that some mischief is brewing. I do not see 
what the Puritans did at this season, when the 
Maples blaze out in scarlet. They certainly 
could not have worshipped in groves then. Per- 
haps that is what they built meeting-houses and 
fenced them round with horse-sheds for. 

THE ELM 

Now, too, the first of October, or later, the 
Elms are at the height of their autumnal beauty, 



222 EXCURSIONS 

great brownish-yellow masses, warm from their 
September oven, hanging over the highway. 
Their leaves are perfectly ripe. I wonder if 
there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the 
men who live beneath them. As I look down our 
street, which is lined with them, they remind me 
both by their form and color of yellowing sheaves 
of grain, as if the harvest had indeed come to 
the village itself, and we might expect to find 
some maturity and flavor in the thoughts of the 
villagers at last. Under those bright rustling 
yellow piles just ready to fall on the heads of the 
walkers, how can any crudity or greenness of 
thought or act prevail? When I stand where 
half a dozen large Elms droop over a house, it is 
as if I stood within a ripe pumpkin-rind, and I 
feel as mellow as if I were the pulp, though I 
may be somewhat stringy and seedy withal. 
What is the late greenness of the English Elm, 
like a cucumber out of season, which does not 
know when to have done, compared with the 
early and golden maturity of the American tree ? 
The street is the scene of a great harvest-home. 
It would be worth the while to set out these trees, 
if only for their autumnal value. Think of these 
great yellow canopies or parasols held over our 
heads and houses by the mile together, making 
the village all one and compact, — an ulmarium, 
which is at the same time a nursery of men ! And 
then how gently and unobserved they drop their 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 223 

burden and let in the sun when it is wanted, their 
leaves not heard when they fall on our roofs and 
in our streets; and thus the village parasol is 
shut up and put away! I see the market-m^n 
driving into the village, and disappearing under 
its canopy of Elm-tops, with his crop, as into a 
great granary or barn-yard. I am tempted to 
go thither as to a husking of thoughts, now dry 
and ripe, and ready to be separated from their 
integuments; but, alas! I foresee that it will be 
chiefly husks and little thought, blasted pig-corn, 
fit only for cob-meal, — for, as you sow, so shall 
you reap. 

FALLEN LEAVES 

By the sixth of October the leaves generally 
begin to fall, in successive showers, after frost or 
rain; but the principal leaf -harvest, the acme of 
the Fall j is commonly about the sixteenth. Some 
morning at that date there is perhaps a harder 
frost than we have seen, and ice formed under the 
pump, and now, when the morning wind rises, 
the leaves come down in denser showers that ever. 
They suddenly form thick beds or carpets on the 
ground, in this gentle air, or even without wind, 
just the size and form of the tree above. Some 
trees, as small Hickories, appear to have dropped 
their leaves instantaneously, as a soldier grounds 
arms at a signal ; and those of the Hickory, being 
bright yellow still, though withered, reflect a 



224 EXCURSIONS 

blaze of light from the ground where they lie. 
Down they have come on all sides, at the first 
earnest touch of autumn's wand, making a sound 
like rain. 

Or else it is after moist and rainy weather that 
we notice how great a fall of leaves there has been 
in the night, though it may not yet be the touch 
that loosens the Rock-Maple leaf. The streets 
are thickly strewn with the trophies, and fallen 
Elm-leaves make a dark brown pavement under 
our feet. After some remarkably warm Indian- 
summer day or days, I perceive that it is the 
unusual heat which, more than anything, causes 
the leaves to fall, there having been, perhaps, no 
frost nor rain for some time. The intense heat 
suddenly ripens and wilts them, just as it softens 
and ripens peaches and other fruits, and causes 
them to drop. 

The leaves of late Red Maples, still bright, 
strew the earth, often crimson-spotted on a yel- 
low ground, like some wild apples, — though they 
preserve these bright colors on the ground but 
a day or two, especially if it rains. On cause- 
ways I go by trees here and there all bare and 
smoke-like, having lost their brilliant clothing; 
but there it lies, nearly as bright as ever, on the 
ground on one side, and making nearly as regular 
a figure as lately on the tree. I would rather say 
that I first observe the trees thus flat on the 
ground like a permanent colored shadow, and 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 225 

they suggest to look for the boughs that bore 
them. A queen might be proud to walk where 
these gallant trees have spread their bright cloaks 
in the mud. I see wagons roll over them as a 
shadow or a reflection, and the drivers heed them 
just as little as they did their shadows before. 

Birds'-nests, in the Huckleberry and other 
shrubs, and in trees, are already being filled with 
the withered leaves. So many have fallen in the 
woods, that a squirrel cannot run after a falling 
nut without being heard. Boys are raking them 
in the streets, if only for the pleasure of dealing 
with such clean crisp substances. Some sweep 
the paths scrupulously neat, and then stand to 
see the next breath strew them with new trophies. 
The swamp-floor is thickly covered, and the 
Lycopodium lucidulum looks suddenly greener 
amid them. In dense woods they half-cover pools 
that are three or four rods long. The other day 
I could hardly find a well-known spring, and 
even suspected that it had dried up, for it was 
completely concealed by freshly fallen leaves; 
and when I swept them aside and revealed it, it 
was like striking the earth, with Aaron's rod, for 
a new spring. Wet grounds about the edges of 
swamps look dry with them. At one swamp, 
where I was surveying, thinking to step on a 
leafy shore from a rail, I got into the water more 
than a foot deep. 

When I go to the river the day after the prin- 



226 EXCURSIONS 

cipal fall of leaves, the sixteenth, I find my boat 
all covered, bottom and seats, with the leaves of 
the Golden Willow under which it is moored, and 
I set sail with a cargo of them rustling under my 
feet. If I empty it, it will be full again to-mor- 
row. I do not regard them as litter, to be swept 
out, but accept them as suitable straw or matting 
for the bottom of my carriage. When I turn up 
into the mouth of the Assabet, which is wooded, 
large fleets of leaves are floating on its surface, 
as it were getting out to sea, with room to tack; 
but next the shore, a little farther up, they are 
thicker than foam, quite concealing the water 
for a rod in width, under and amid the Alders, 
Button-Bushes, and Maples, still perfectly light 
and dry, with fibre unrelaxed; and at a rocky 
bend where they are met and stopped by the 
morning wind, they sometimes form a broad and 
dense crescent quite across the river. When I 
turn my prow that way, and the wave which it 
makes strikes them, list what a pleasant rustling 
from these dry substances grating on one an- 
other! Often it is their undulation only which 
reveals the water beneath them. Also every mo- 
tion of the wood-turtle on the shore is betrayed 
by their rustling there. Or even in mid-channel, 
when the wind rises, I hear them blown with a 
rustling sound. Higher up they are slowly mov- 
ing round and round in some great eddy which 
the river makes, as that at the "Leaning Hem- 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 227 

locks," where the water is deep, and the current 
is wearing into the bank. 

Perchance, in the afternoon of such a day, 
when the water is perfectly calm and full of re- 
flections, I paddle gently down the main stream, 
and, turning up the Assabet, reach a quiet cove, 
where I unexpectedly find myself surrounded 
by myriads of leaves, like fellow- voyagers, which 
seem to have the same purpose, or want of pur- 
pose, with myself. See this great fleet of scat- 
tered leaf -boats which we paddle amid, in this 
smooth river-bay, each one curled up on every 
side by the sun's skill, each nerve a stiff spruce- 
knee, — like boats of hide, and of all patterns, 
Charon's boat probably among the rest, and some 
with lofty prows and poops, like the stately ves- 
sels of the ancients, scarcely moving in the slug- 
gish current, — like the great fleets, the dense 
Chinese cities of boats, with which you mingle on 
entering some great mart, some New York or 
Canton, which we are all steadily approaching 
together. How gently each has been deposited 
on the water ! No violence has been used toward 
them yet, though, perchance, palpitating hearts 
were present at the launching. And painted 
ducks, too, the splendid wood-duck among the 
rest, often come to sail and float amid the painted 
leaves, — barks of a nobler model still! 

What wholesome herb-drinks are to be had in 
the swamps now! What strong medicinal, but 



228 EXCURSIONS 

rich, scents from the decaying leaves! The rain 
falling on the freshly dried herbs and leaves, and 
filling the pools and ditches into which they have 
dropped thus clean and rigid, will soon convert 
them into tea, — green, black, brown, and yellow 
teas, of all degrees of strength, enough to set 
all Nature a gossiping. Whether we drink them 
or not, as yet, before their strength is drawn, 
these leaves, dried on great Nature's coppers, 
are of such various pure and delicate tints as 
might make the fame of Oriental teas. 

How they are mixed up, of all species, Oak and 
Maple and Chestnut and Birch! But Nature is 
not cluttered with them ; she is a perfect husband- 
man; she stores them all. Consider what a vast 
crop is thus annually shed on the earth! This, 
more than any mere grain or seed, is the great 
harvest of the year. The trees are now repay- 
ing the earth with interest what they have taken 
from it. They are discounting. They are about 
to add a leaf's thickness to the depth of the soil. 
This is the beautiful way in which Nature gets 
her muck, while I chaffer with this man and that, 
who talks to me about sulphur and the cost of 
carting. We are all the richer for their decay. 
I am more interested in this crop than in the 
English grass alone or in the corn. It prepares 
the virgin mould for future cornfields and for- 
ests, on which the earth fattens. It keeps our 
homestead in good heart. 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 229 

For beautiful variety no crop can be compared 
with this. Here is not merely the plain yellow of 
the grains, but nearly all the colors that we know, 
the brightest blue not excepted : the early blush- 
ing Maple, the Poison- Sumach blazing its sins 
as scarlet, the mulberry Ash, the rich chrome- 
yellow of the Poplars, the brilliant red Huckle- 
berry, with which the hills' backs are painted, like 
those of sheep. The frost touches them, and, 
with the slightest breath of returning day or jar- 
ring of earth's axle, see in what showers they 
come floating down! The ground is all party- 
colored with them. But they still live in the soil, 
whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the 
forests that spring from it. They stoop to rise, 
to mount higher in coming years, by subtle chem- 
istry, climbing by the sap in the trees, and the 
sapling's first fruits thus shed, transmuted at 
last, may adorn its crown, when, in after years, 
it has become the monarch of the forest. 

It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these 
fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beauti- 
fully they go to their graves! how gently lay 
themselves down and turn to mould ! — painted of 
a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us 
living. So they troop to their last resting-place, 
light and frisky. They put on no weeds, but 
merrily they go scampering over the earth, 
selecting the spot, choosing a lot, ordering no 
iron fence, whispering all through the woods 



230 EXCURSIONS 

about it, — some choosing the spot where the 
bodies of men are mouldering beneath, and meet- 
ing them half-way. How many flutterings be- 
fore they rest quietly in their graves ! They that 
soared so loftily, how contentedly they return 
to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie 
and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford 
nourishment to new generations of their kind, as 
well as to flutter on high! They teach us how 
to die. One wonders if the time will ever come 
when men, with their boasted faith in immortal- 
ity, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe, — 
with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed 
their bodies, as they do their hair and nails. 

When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a 
cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander 
and muse over them in their graves. Here are 
no lying nor vain epitaphs. What though you 
own no lot at Mount Auburn ? Your lot is surely 
cast somewhere in this vast cemetery, which has 
been consecrated from of old. You need attend 
no auction to secure a place. There is room 
enough here. The Loose-strife shall bloom and 
the Huckleberry-bird sing over your bones. The 
woodman and hunter shall be your sextons, and 
the children shall tread upon the borders as 
much as they will. Let us walk in the cemetery 
of the leaves, — this is your true Greenwood 
Cemetery. 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 231 

THE SUGAR-MAPLE 

But think not that the splendor of the year is 
over; for as one leaf does not make a summer, 
neither does one falling leaf make an autumn. 
The smallest Sugar- Maples in our streets make 
a great show as early as the fifth of October, 
more than any other trees there. As I look up 
the Main Street, they appear like painted screens 
standing before the houses ; yet many are green. 
But now, or generally by the seventeenth of 
October, when almost all Red Maples, and some 
White Maples, are bare, the large Sugar-Maples 
also are in their glory, glowing with yellow and 
red, and show unexpectedly bright and delicate 
tints. They are remarkable for the contrast 
they often afford of deep blushing red on one 
half and green on the other. They become at 
length dense masses of rich yellow with a deep 
scarlet blush, or more than blush, on the exposed 
surfaces. They are the brightest trees now in 
the street. 

The large ones on our Common are particu- 
larly beautiful. A delicate, but warmer than 
golden yellow is now the prevailing color, with 
scarlet cheeks. Yet, standing on the east side 
of the Common just before sundown, when the 
western light is transmitted through them, I see 
that their yellow even, compared with the pale 



232 EXCURSIONS 

lemon yellow of an Elm close by, amounts to a 
scarlet, without noticing the bright scarlet por- 
tions. Generally, they are great regular oval 
masses of yellow and scarlet. All the sunny 
warmth of the season, the Indian- summer, seems 
to be absorbed in their leaves. The lowest and 
inmost leaves next the bole are, as usual, of the 
most delicate yellow and green, like the complex- 
ion of young men brought up in the house. There 
is an auction on the Common to-day, but its red 
flag is hard to be discerned amid this blaze of 
color. 

Little did the fathers of the town anticipate 
this brilliant success, when they caused to be im- 
ported from farther in the country some straight 
poles with their tops cut off, which they called 
Sugar-Maples; and, as I remember, after they 
were set out, a neighboring merchant's clerk, by 
way of jest, planted beans about them. Those 
which were then jestingly called bean-poles are 
to-day far the most beautiful objects noticeable 
in our streets. They are worth all and more than 
they have cost, — though one of the selectmen, 
while setting them out, took the cold which occa- 
sioned his death, — if only because they have filled 
the open eyes of children with their rich color un- 
stintedly so many Octobers. We will not ask 
them to yield us sugar in the spring, while they 
afford us so fair a prospect in the autumn. 
Wealth in-doors may be the inheritance of few, 




Main Street maples 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 233 

but it is equally distributed on the Common. All 
children alike can revel in this golden harvest. 

Surely trees should be set in our streets with a 
view to their October splendor; though I doubt 
whether this is ever considered by the "Tree So- 
ciety." Do you not think it will make some odds 
to these children that they were brought up under 
the Maples? Hundreds of eyes are steadily 
drinking in this color, and by these teachers even 
the truants are caught and educated the moment 
they step abroad. Indeed, neither the truant 
nor the studious is at present taught color in the 
schools. These are instead of the bright colors 
in apothecaries' shops and city windows. It is 
a pity that we have no more Red Maples, and 
some Hickories, in our streets as well. Our 
paint-box is very imperfectly filled. Instead of, 
or beside, supplying such paint-boxes as we do, 
we might supply these natural colors to the 
young. Where else will they study color under 
greater advantages? What School of Design 
can vie with this? Think how much the eyes of 
painters of all kinds, and of manufacturers of 
cloth and paper, and paper-stainers, and count- 
less others, are to be educated by these autumnal 
colors. The stationer's envelopes may be of very 
various tints, yet, not so various as those of the 
leaves of a single tree. If you want a different 
shade or tint of a particular color, you have only 
to look farther within or without the tree or the 



234 EXCURSIONS 

wood. These leaves are not many dipped in one 
dye, as at the dye-house, but they are dyed in 
light of infinitely various degrees of strength, 
and left to set and dry there. 

Shall the names of so many of our colors con- 
tinue to be derived from those of obscure foreign 
localities, as Naples yellow, Prussian blue, raw 
Sienna, burnt Umber, Gamboge? — (surely the 
Tyrian purple must have faded by this time), — 
or from comparatively trivial articles of com- 
merce, — chocolate, lemon, coffee, cinnamon, 
claret? — (shall we compare our Hickory to a 
lemon, or a lemon to a Hickory ? ) — or from ores 
and oxides which few ever see? Shall we so 
often, when describing to our neighbors the color 
of something we have seen, refer them, not to 
some natural object in our neighborhood, but 
perchance to a bit of earth fetched from the other 
side of the planet, which possibly they may find 
at the apothecary's, but which probably neither 
they nor we ever saw? Have we not an earth 
under our feet, — ay, and a sky over our heads? 
Or is the last all ultramarine? What do we 
know of sapphire, amethyst, emerald, ruby, 
amber, and the like, — most of us who take these 
names in vain? Leave these precious words to 
cabinet-keepers, virtuosos, and maids-of-honor, 
— to the Nabobs, Begums, and Chobdars of 
Hindostan, or wherever else. I do not see why, 
since America and her autumn woods have been 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 235 

discovered, our leaves should not compete with 
the precious stones in giving names to colors; 
and, indeed, I believe that in course of time the 
names of some of our trees and shrubs, as well as 
flowers, will get into our popular chromatic 
nomenclature. 

But of much more importance than a knowl- 
edge of the names and distinctions of color is the 
joy and exhilaration which these colored leaves 
excite. Already these brilliant trees throughout 
the street, without any more variety, are at least 
equal to an annual festival and holiday, or a 
week of such. These are cheap and innocent 
gala-days, celebrated by one and all without the 
aid of committees or marshals, such a show as 
may safely be licensed, not attracting gamblers 
*or rum-sellers, not requiring any special police to 
keep the peace. And poor indeed must be that 
New England village's October which has not 
the Maple in its streets. This October festival 
costs no powder, nor ringing of bells, but every 
tree is a living liberty-pole on which a thousand 
bright flags are waving. 

No wonder that we must have our annual 
Cattle- Show, and Fall Training, and perhaps 
Cornwallis, our September Courts, and the like. 
Nature herself holds her annual fair in October, 
not only in the streets, but in every hollow and on 
every hill-side. When lately we looked into that 
Red-Maple swamp all ablaze, where the trees 



236 EXCURSIONS 

were clothed in their vestures of most dazzling 
tints, did it not suggest a thousand gypsies be- 
neath, — a race capable of wild delight, — or even 
the fabled fawns, satyrs, and wood-nymphs come 
back to earth ? Or was it only a congregation of 
wearied wood-choppers, or of proprietors come 
to inspect their lots, that we thought of ? Or, ear- 
lier still, when we paddled on the river through 
that fine-grained September air, did there 
not appear to be something new going on under 
the sparkling surface of the stream, a shaking 
of props, 1 at least, so that we made haste in order 
to be up in time? Did not the rows of yellow 
Willows and Button-Bushes on each side seem 
like rows of booths, under which, perhaps, some 
fluviatile egg-pop equally yellow was efferves- 
cing? Did not all these suggest that man's 
spirits should rise as high as Nature's, — should 
hang out their flag, and the routine of his life 
be interrupted by an analogous expression of 
joy and hilarity? 

No annual training or muster of soldiery, no 
celebration with its scarfs and banners, could 
import into the town a hundredth part of the 
annual splendor of our October. We have only 
to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature 
will find the colored drapery, — flags of all her 
nations, some of whose private signals hardly 

1 "Props," a Massachusetts game played with shells instead of 
dice. 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 237 

the botanist can read, — while we walk under the 
triumphal arches of the Elms. Leave it to 
Nature to appoint the days, whether the same as 
in neighboring States or not, and let the clergy 
read her proclamations, if they can understand 
them. Behold what a brilliant drapery is her 
Woodbine flag ! What public-spirited merchant, 
think you, has contributed this part of the show? 
There is no handsomer shingling and paint than 
this vine, at present covering a whole side of 
some houses. I do not believe that the Ivy never 
sere is comparable to it. No wonder it has been 
extensively introduced into London. Let us 
have a good many Maples and Hickories and 
Scarlet Oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall 
that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all 
the colors a village can display? A village is 
not complete, unless it have these trees to mark 
the season in it. They are important, like the 
town clock. A village that has them not will not 
be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an 
essential part is wanting. Let us have Willows 
for spring, Elms for summer, Maples and Wal- 
nuts and Tupeloes for autumn, Evergreens for 
winter, and Oaks for all seasons. What is a 
gallery in a house to a gallery in the streets, 
which every marketman rides through, whether 
he will or not? Of course, there is not a picture- 
gallery in the country which would be worth so 
much to us as is the western view at sunset under 



238 EXCURSIONS 

the Elms of our main street. They are the frame 
to a picture which is daily painted behind them. 
An avenue of Elms as large as our largest and 
three miles long would seem to lead to some ad- 
mirable place, though only C were at the 

end of it. 

A village needs these innocent stimulants of 
bright and cheering prospects to keep off melan- 
choly and superstition. Show me two villages, 
one embowered in trees and blazing with all the 
glories of October, the other a merely trivial and 
treeless waste, or with only a single tree or two 
for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the lat- 
ter will be found the most starved and bigoted 
religionists and the most desperate drinkers. 
Every washtub and milkcan and gravestone will 
be exposed. The inhabitants will disappear 
abruptly behind their barns and houses, like 
desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I shall look 
to see spears in their hands. They will be ready 
to accept the most barren and forlorn doctrine, — 
as that the world is speedily coming to an end, 
or has already got to it, or that they themselves 
are turned wrong side outward. They will per- 
chance crack their dry joints at one another and 
call it a spiritual communication. 

But to confine ourselves to the Maples. What 
if we were to take half as much pains in protect- 
ing them as we do in setting them out, — not 
stupidly tie our horses to our dahlia-stems ? 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 239 

What meant the fathers by establishing this 
perfectly living institution before the church, — 
this institution which needs no repairing nor re- 
painting, which is continually enlarged and re- 
paired by its growth? Surely they 

"Wrought in a sad sincerity; 
Themselves from God they could not free; 
They planted better than they knew; — 
The conscious trees to beauty grew." 

Verily these Maples are cheap preachers, per- 
manently settled, which preach their half-cen- 
tury, and century, ay, and century-and-a-half 
sermons, with constantly increasing unction and 
influence, ministering to many generations of 
men; and tne least we can do is to supply them 
with suitable colleagues as they grow infirm. 

THE SCARLET OAK 

Belonging to a genus which is remarkable for 
the beautiful form of its leaves, I suspect that 
some Scarlet-Oak leaves surpass those of all 
other Oaks in the rich and wild beauty of their 
outlines. I judge from an acquaintance with 
twelve species, and from drawings which I have 
seen of manv others. 

Stand under this tree and see how finely its 
leaves are cut against the sky, — as it were, only 
a few sharp points extending from a mid-rib. 
They look like double, treble, or quadruple 



240 EXCURSIONS 

crosses. They are far more ethereal than the 
less deeply scalloped Oak-leaves. They have so 
little leafy terra firma that they appear melting 
away in the light, and scarcely obstruct our view. 
The leaves of very young plants are, like those 
of full-grown Oaks of other species, more en- 
tire, simple, and lumpish in their outlines; but 
these, raised high on old trees, have solved the 
leafy problem. Lifted higher and higher, and 
sublimated more and more, putting off some 
earthiness and cultivating more intimacy with 
the light each year, they have at length the least 
possible amount of earthy matter, and the great- 
est spread and grasp of skyey influences. There 
they dance, arm in arm with the light, — tripping 
it on fantastic points, fit partners in those aerial 
halls. So intimately mingled are they with it, 
that, what with their slenderness and their glossy 
surfaces, you can hardly tell at last what in the 
dance is leaf and what is light. And when no 
zephyr stirs, they are at most but a rich tracery 
to the forest-windows. 

I am again struck with their beauty, when, a 
month later, they thickly strew the ground in 
the woods, piled one upon another under my feet. 
They are then brown above, but purple beneath. 
With their narrow lobes and their bold deep 
scollops reaching almost to the middle, they sug- 
gest that the material must be cheap, or else there 
has been a lavish expense in their creation, as if 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 241 

so much had been cut out. Or else they seem to 
us the remnants of the stuff out of which leaves 
have been cut with a die. Indeed, when they lie 
thus one upon another, they remind me of a pile 
of scrap-tin. 

Or bring one home, and study it closely at your 
leisure, by the fireside. It is a type, not from any 
Oxford font, not in the Basque nor the arrow- 
headed character, not found on the Rosetta 
Stone, but destined to be copied in sculpture one 
day, if they ever get to whittling stone here. 
What a wild and pleasing outline, a combination 
of graceful curves and angles! The eye rests 
with equal delight on what is not leaf and on 
what is leaf, — on the broad, free, open sinuses, 
and on the long, sharp, bristle-pointed lobes. A 
simple oval outline would include it all, if you 
connected the points of the leaf; but how much 
richer is it than that, with its half-dozen deep 
scollops, in which the eye and thought of the 
beholder are embayed! If I were a drawing- 
master, I would set my pupils to copying these 
leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and 
gracefully. 

Regarded as water, it is like a pond with half 
a dozen broad rounded promontories extending 
nearly to its middle, half from each side, while 
its watery bays extend far inland, like sharp 
friths, at each of whose heads several fine streams 
empty in, — almost a leafy archipelago. 



242 EXCURSIONS 

But it oftener suggests land, and, as Dionysius 
and Pliny compared the form of the Morea to 
that of the leaf of the Oriental Plane-tree, so this 
leaf reminds me of some fair wild island in the 
ocean, whose extensive coast, alternate rounded 
bays with smooth strands, and sharp-pointed 
rocky capes, mark it as fitted for the habitation 
of man, and destined to become a centre of civil- 
ization at last. To the sailor's eye, it is a much- 
indented shore. Is it not, in fact, a shore to the 
aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats? At 
sight of this leaf we are all mariners,— if not 
vikings, buccaneers, and filibusters, Both our 
love of repose and our spirit of adventure are 
addressed. In our most casual glance, per- 
chance, we think, that, if we succeed in doubling 
those sharp capes, we shall find deep, smooth, 
and secure havens in the ample bays. How dif- 
ferent from the White-Oak leaf, with its rounded 
headlands, on which no lighthouse need be 
placed! That is an England, with its long civil 
history, that may be read. This is some still 
unsettled New-found Island or Celebes. Shall 
we go and be rajahs there? 

By the twenty-sixth of October the large Scar- 
let Oaks are in their prime, when other Oaks are 
usually withered. They have been kindling 
their fires for a week past, and now generally 
burst into a blaze. This alone of our indigenous 
deciduous trees (excepting the Dogwood, of 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 243 

which I do not know half a dozen, and they are 
but large bushes) is now in its glory. The two 
Aspens and the Sugar-Maple come nearest to 
it in date, but they have lost the greater part of 
their leaves. Of evergreens, only the Pitch-Pine 
is still commonly bright. 

But it requires a particular alertness, if not 
devotion to these phenomena, to appreciate the 
widespread, but late and unexpected glory of 
the Scarlet Oaks. I do not speak here of the 
small trees and shrubs, which are commonly ob- 
served, and which are now withered, but of the 
large trees. Most go in and shut their doors, 
thinking that bleak and colorless November has 
already come, when some of the most brilliant 
and memorable colors are not yet lit. 

This very perfect and vigorous one, about! 
forty feet high, standing in an open pasture, 
which was quite glossy green on the twelfth, is 
now, the twenty-sixth, completely changed to 
bright dark scarlet, — every leaf, between you and 
the sun, as if it had been dipped into a scarlet 
dye. The whole tree is much like a heart in form, 
as well as color. Was not this worth waiting 
for? Little did you think, ten days ago, that 
that cold green tree would assume such color as 
this. Its leaves are still firmly attached, while 
those of other trees are falling around it. It 
seems to say, — "I am the last to blush, but I 
blush deeper than any of ye. I bring up the rear 



244 EXCURSIONS 

in my red coat. We Scarlet ones, alone of Oaks, 
have not given up the fight." 

The sap is now, and even far into November, 
frequently flowing fast in these trees, as in Ma- 
ples in the spring; and apparently their bright 
tints, now that most other Oaks are withered, are 
connected with this phenomenon. They are full 
of life. It has a pleasantly astringent, acorn-like 
taste, this strong Oak-wine, as I find on tapping 
them with my knife. 

Looking across this woodland valley, a quarter 
of a mile wide, how rich those Scarlet Oaks, em- 
bosomed in Pines, their bright red branches in- 
timately intermingled with them! They have 
their full effect there. The Pine-boughs are the 
green calyx to their red petals. Or, as we go 
along a road in the woods, the sun striking end- 
wise through it, and lighting up the red tents 
of the Oaks, which on each side are mingled with 
the liquid green of the Pines, makes a very 
gorgeous scene. Indeed, without the evergreens 
for contrast, the autumnal tints would lose much 
of their effect. 

The Scarlet Oak asks a clear sky and the 
brightness of late October days. These bring out 
its colors. If the sun goes into a cloud, they be- 
come comparatively indistinct. As I sit on a cliff 
in the southwest part of our town, the sun is now 
getting low, and the woods in Lincoln, south and 
east of me, are lit up by its more level rays ; and 




^ 



=3 






.8? 



AUTUMXAL TIXTS 245 

in the Scarlet Oaks, scattered so equally over the 
forest, there is brought out a more brilliant red- 
ness than I had believed was in them. Every 
tree of this species which is visible in those direc- 
tions, even to the horizon, now stands out dis- 
tinctly red. Some great ones lift their red backs 
high above the woods, in the next town, like huge 
roses with a myriad of fine petals; and some 
more slender ones, in a small grove of White 
Pines on Pine Hill in the east, on the very 
verge of the horizon, alternating with the Pines 
on the edge of the grove, and shouldering them 
with their red coats, look like soldiers in red 
amid hunters in green. This time it is Lincoln 
green, too. Till the sun got low, I did not be- 
lieve that there were so many red coats in the 
forest army. Theirs is an intense burning red, 
which would lose some of its strength, methinks, 
with every step you might take toward them; 
for the shade that lurks amid their foliage does 
not report itself at this distance, and they are 
unanimously red. The focus of their reflected 
color is in the atmosphere far on this side. Every 
such tree becomes a nucleus of red, as it were, 
where, with the declining sun, that color grows 
and glows. It is partly borrowed fire, gathering 
strength from the sun on its way to your eye. 
It has only some comparatively dull red leaves 
for a rallying-point, or kindling-stuff, to start 
it, and it becomes an intense scarlet or red mist, 



246 EXCURSIONS 

or fire, which finds fuel for itself in the very 
atmosphere. So vivacious is redness. The very 
rails reflect a rosy light at this hour and season. 
You see a redder tree than exists. 

If you wish to count the Scarlet Oaks, do it 
now. In a clear day stand thus on a hill-top in 
the woods, when the sun is an hour high, and 
every one within range of your vision, excepting 
in the west, will be revealed. You might live to 
the age of Methuselah and never find a tithe of 
them, otherwise. Yet sometimes even in a dark 
day I have thought them as bright as I ever saw 
them. Looking westward, their colors are lost 
in a blaze of light; but in other directions the 
whole forest is a flower-garden, in which these 
late roses burn, alternating with green, while the 
so-called "gardeners," walking here and there, 
perchance, beneath, with spade and water-pot, 
see only a few little asters amid withered leaves. 

These are my China-asters, my late garden- 
flowers. It costs me nothing for a gardener. The 
falling leaves, all over the forest, are protecting 
the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to 
be seen, and you will have garden enough, with- 
out deepening the soil in your yard. We have 
only to elevate our view a little, to see the whole 
forest as a garden. The blossoming of the Scar- 
let Oak, — the forest-flower, surpassing all in 
splendor (at least since the Maple) ! I do not 
know but they interest me more than the Maples, 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 247 

they are so widely and equally dispersed through- 
out the forest; they are so hardy, a nobler tree 
on the whole; — our chief November flower, 
abiding the approach of winter with us, impart- 
ing warmth to early November prospects. It is 
remarkable that the latest bright color that is 
general should be this deep, dark scarlet and red, 
the intensest of colors. The ripest fruit of the 
year; like the cheek of a hard, glossy, red apple, 
from the cold Isle of Orleans, which will not be 
mellow for eating till next spring! When I rise 
to a hill-top, a thousand of these great Oak roses, 
distributed on every side, as far as the horizon ! I 
admire them four or five miles off ! This my un- 
failing prospect for a fortnight past! This late 
forest-flower surpasses all that spring or summer 
could do. Their colors were but rare and dainty 
specks comparatively, (created for the near- 
sighted, who walk amid the humblest herbs and 
underwoods,) and made no impression on a dis- 
tant eye. Now it is an extended forest or a 
mountain-side, through or along which we jour- 
ney from day to day, that bursts into bloom. 
Comparatively, our gardening is on a petty scale, 
— the gardener still nursing a few asters amid 
dead weeds, ignorant of the gigantic asters and 
roses, which, as it were, overshadow him, and 
ask for none of his care. It is like a little red 
paint ground on a saucer, and held up against 
the sunset sky. Why not take more elevated and 



248 EXCURSIONS 

broader views, walk in the great garden, not 
skulk in a little "debauched" nook of it? con- 
sider the beauty of the forest, and not merely of 
a few impounded herbs? 

Let your walks now be a little more adven- 
turous; ascend the hills. If, about the last of 
October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of 
our town, and probably of yours, and look over 

the forest, you may see well, what I have 

endeavored to describe. All this you surely will 
see, and much more, if you are prepared to see 
it, — if you look for it. Otherwise, regular and 
universal as this phenomenon is, whether you 
stand on the hill-top or in the hollow, you will 
think for threescore years and ten that all the 
wood is, at this season, sere and brown. Objects 
are concealed from our view, not so much because 
they are out of the course of our visual ray as 
because we do not bring our minds and eyes to 
bear on them ; for there is no power to see in the 
eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We 
do not realize how far and widely, or how near 
and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part 
of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason 
concealed from us all our lives. The gardener 
sees only the gardener's garden. Here, too, as 
in political economy, the supply answers to the 
demand. Nature does not cast pearls before 
swine. There is just as much beauty visible to 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 249 

us in the landscape as we are prepared to appre- 
ciate, — not a grain more. The actual objects 
which one man will see from a particular hill-top 
are just as different from those which another 
will see as the beholders are different. The Scar- 
let Oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you 
go forth. We cannot see anything until we are 
possessed with the idea of it, take it into our 
heads, — and then we can hardly see anything 
else. In my botanical rambles, I find, that, first, 
the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my 
thoughts, though it may seem very foreign to 
this locality, — no nearer than Hudson's Bay, — 
and for some weeks or months I go thinking of 
it, and expecting it, unconsciously, and at length 
I surely see it. This is the history of my finding 
a score or more of rare plants, which I could 
name. A man sees only what concerns him. A 
botanist absorbed in the study of grasses does not 
distinguish the grandest Pasture Oaks. He, as 
it were, tramples down Oaks unwittingly in his 
walk, or at most sees only their shadows. I have 
found that it required a different intention of the 
eye, in the same locality, to see different plants, 
even when they were closely allied, as Juncacece 
and Graminece: when I was looking for the for- 
mer, I did not see the latter in the midst of them. 
How much more, then, it required different in- 
tentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to 



250 EXCURSIONS 

different departments of knowledge! How dif- 
ferently the poet and the naturalist look at ob- 
jects! 

Take a New-England selectman, and set him 
on the highest of our hills, and tell him to look, — 
sharpening his sight to the utmost, and putting 
on the glasses that suit him best, (ay, using a 
spy-glass, if he likes,) — and make a full report. 
What, probably, will he spy? — what will he select 
to look at? Of course, he will see a Brocken 
spectre of himself. He will see several meeting- 
houses, at least, and, perhaps, that somebody 
ought to be assessed higher than he is, since he 
has so handsome a wood-lot. Now take Julius 
Caesar, or Immanuel Swedenborg, or a Fegee- 
Islander, and set him up there. Or suppose all 
together, and let them compare notes afterward. 
Will it appear that they have enjoyed the same 
prospect ? What they will see will be as different 
as Rome was from Heaven or Hell, or the last 
from the Fegee Islands. For aught we know, 
as strange a man as any of these is always at our 
elbow. 

Why, it takes a sharp-shooter to bring down 
even such trivial game as snipes and wood-cocks ; 
he must take very particular aim, and know 
what he is aiming at. He would stand a very 
small chance, if he fired at random into the sky; 
being told that snipes were flying there. And so 
is it with him that shoots at beauty; though he 



AUTUMNAL TINTS 251 

wait till the sky falls, he will not bag any, if he 
does not already know its seasons and haunts, 
and the color of its wing, — if he has not dreamed 
of it, so that he can anticipate it ; then, indeed, he 
flushes it at every step, shoots double and on the 
wing, with both barrels, even in cornfields. The 
sportsman trains himself, dresses and watches 
unweariedly, and loads and primes for his partic- 
ular game. He prays for it, and offers sacrifices, 
and so he gets it. After due and long prepara- 
tion, schooling his eye and hand, dreaming awake 
and asleep, with gun and paddle and boat he 
goes out after meadow-hens, which most of his 
townsmen never saw nor dreamed of, and paddles 
for miles against a headwind, and wades in water 
up to his knees, being out all day without his din- 
ner, and therefore he gets them. He had them 
half-way into his bag when he started, and has 
only to shove them down. The true sportsman 
can shoot you almost any of his game from his 
windows: what else has he windows or eyes for? 
It comes and perches at last on the barrel of his 
gun; but the rest of the world never see it with 
the feathers on. The geese fly exactly under his 
zenith, and honk when they get there, and he will 
keep himself supplied by firing up his chimney; 
twenty musquash have the refusal of each one of 
his traps before it is empty. If he lives, and his 
game-spirit increases, heaven and earth shall fail 
him sooner than game ; and when he dies, he will 



252 EXCURSIONS 

go to more extensive, and, perchance, happier 
hunting-grounds. The fisherman, too, dreams of 
fish, sees a bobbing cork in his dreams, till he can 
almost catch them in his sink-spout. I knew a 
girl who, being sent to pick huckleberries, picked 
wild gooseberries by the quart, where no one else 
knew that there were any, because she was accus- 
tomed to pick them up country where she came 
from. The astronomer knows where to go star- 
gathering, and sees one clearly in his mind before 
any have seen it with a glass. The hen scratches 
and finds her food right under where she stands ; 
but such is not the way with the hawk. 

These bright leaves which I have mentioned 
are not the exception, but the rule ; for I believe 
that all leaves, even grasses and mosses, acquire 
brighter colors just before their fall. When you 
come to observe faithfully the changes of each 
humblest plant, you find that each has, sooner or 
later, its peculiar autumnal tint; and if you 
undertake to make a complete list of the bright 
tints, it will be nearly as long as a catalogue of 
the plants in your vicinity. 



WILD APPLES 

[1862] 
THE HISTORY OF THE APPLE-TREE 

IT is remarkable how closely the history of the 
Apple-tree is connected with that of man. 
The geologist tells us that the order of the 
Rosacece, which includes the Apple, also the true 
Grasses, and the Labiatce, or Mints, were intro- 
duced only a short time previous to the appear- 
ance of man on the globe. 

It appears that apples made a part of the food 
of that unknown primitive people whose traces 
have lately been found at the bottom of the 
Swiss lakes, supposed to be older than the foun- 
dation of Rome, so old that they had no metallic 
implements. An entire black and shrivelled 
Crab- Apple has been recovered from their stores. 

Tacitus says of the ancient Germans, that they 
satisfied their hunger with wild apples (agrestia 
poma) among other things. 

Niebuhr observes that "the words for a house, 
a field, a plough, ploughing, wine, oil, milk, 
sheep, apples, and others relating to agriculture 
and the gentler way of life, agree in Latin and 
Greek, while the Latin words for all objects per- 

253 



254 EXCURSIONS 

taining to war or the chase are utterly alien from 
the Greek." Thus the apple-tree may be con- 
sidered a symbol of peace no less than the olive. 

The apple was early so important, and gener- 
ally distributed, that its name traced to its root 
in many languages signifies fruit in general. 
MfjXov, in Greek, means an apple, also the fruit 
of other trees, also a sheep and any cattle, and 
finally riches in general. 

The apple-tree has been celebrated by the 
Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians. 
Some have thought that the first human pair were 
tempted by its fruit. Goddesses are fabled to 
have contended for it, dragons were set to watch 
it, and heroes were employed to pluck it. 

The tree is mentioned in at least three places 
in the Old Testament, and its fruit in two or 
three more. Solomon sings, — "As the apple- 
tree among the trees of the wood, so is my be- 
loved among the sons." And again, — "Stay me 
with flagons, comfort me with apples." The 
noblest part of man's noblest feature is named 
from this fruit, "the apple of the eye." 

The apple-tree is also mentioned by Homer 
and Herodotus. Ulysses saw in the glorious 
garden of Alcinoiis "pears and pomegranates, 
and apple-trees, bearing beautiful fruit" (xal 
[LT^iai dyXaoxapToO. And according to Homer, 
apples were among the fruits which Tantalus 
could not pluck, the wind ever blowing their 




|0 

■v. 
CO 






WILD APPLES 255 

boughs away from him. Theophrastus knew and 
described the apple-tree as a botanist. 

According to the Prose Edda, "Iduna keeps 
in a box the apples which the gods, when they 
feel old age approaching, have only to taste of 
to become young again. It is in this manner that 
they will be kept in renovated youth until Rag- 
narok" (or the destruction of the gods). 

I learn from Loudon that "the ancient Welsh 
bards were rewarded for excelling in song by the 
token of the apple-spray;" and "in the Highlands 
of Scotland the apple-tree is the badge of the 
clan Lamont." 

The apple-tree (Pyrus malus) belongs chiefly 
to the northern temperate zone. Loudon says, 
that "it grew spontaneously in every part of 
Europe except the frigid zone, and throughout 
Western Asia, China, and Japan." We have 
also two or three varieties of the apple indigenous 
in North America. The cultivated apple-tree 
was first introduced into this country by the 
earliest settlers, and is thought to do as well or 
better here than anywhere else. Probably some 
of the varieties which are now cultivated were 
first introduced into Britain by the Romans. 

Pliny, adopting the distinction of Theophras- 
tus, says, — "Of trees there are some which are 
altogether wild {sylvestres) , some more civilized 
(urbaniores) ." Theophrastus includes the apple 
among the last ; and, indeed, it is in this sense the 



256 EXCURSIONS 

most civilized of all trees. It is as harmless as 
a dove, as beautiful as a rose, and as valuable as 
flocks and herds. It has been longer cultivated 
than any other, and so is more humanized; and 
who knows but, like the dog, it will at length be 
no longer traceable to its wild original? It 
migrates with man, like the dog and horse and 
cow: first, perchance, from Greece to Italy, 
thence to England, thence to America; and our 
Western emigrant is still marching steadily to- 
ward the setting sun with the seeds of the apple 
in his pocket, or perhaps a few young trees 
strapped to his load. At least a million apple- 
trees are thus set farther westward this vear than 
any cultivated ones grew last year. Consider 
how the Blossom- Week, like the Sabbath, is thus 
annually spreading over the prairies; for when 
man migrates, he carries with him not only his 
birds, quadrupeds, insects, vegetables, and his 
very sward, but his orchard also. 

The leaves and tender twigs are an agreeable 
food to many domestic animals, as the cow, horse, 
sheep, and goat ; and the fruit is sought after by 
the first, as well as by the hog. Thus there ap- 
pears to have existed a natural alliance between 
these animals and this tree from the first. "The 
fruit of the Crab in the forests of France" is said 
to be " a great resource for the wild-boar." 

Not only the Indian, but many indigenous in- 
sects, birds, and quadrupeds, welcomed the apple- 



WILD APPLES 257 

tree to these shores. The tent-caterpillar sad- 
dled her eggs on the very first twig that was 
formed, and it has since shared her affections 
with the wild cherry; and the canker-worm also 
in a measure abandoned the elm to feed on it. As 
it grew apace, the blue-bird, robin, cherry-bird, 
king-bird, and many more, came with haste and 
built their nests and warbled in its boughs, and 
so became orchard-birds, and multiplied more 
than ever. It was an era in the history of their 
race. The downy woodpecker found such a sa- 
vory morsel under its bark, that he perforated it 
in a ring quite round the tree, before he left it, — 
a thing which he had never done before, to my 
knowledge. It did not take the partridge long 
to find out how sweet its buds were, and every 
winter eve she flew, and still flies, from the wood, 
to pluck them, much to the farmer's sorrow. The 
rabbit, too, was not slow to learn the taste of its 
twigs and bark ; and when the fruit was ripe, the 
squirrel half-rolled, half-carried it to his hole; 
and even the musquash crept up the bank from 
the brook at evening, and greedily devoured it, 
until he had worn a path in the grass there ; and 
when it was frozen and thawed, the crow and the 
jay were glad to taste it occasionally. The owl 
crept into the first apple-tree that became hollow, 
and fairly hooted with delight, finding it just the 
place for him ; so, settling down into it, he has re- 
mained there ever since. 



258 EXCURSIONS 

My theme being the Wild Apple, I will merely 
glance at some of the seasons in the annual 
growth of the cultivated apple, and pass on to 
my special province. 

The flowers of the apple are perhaps the most 
beautiful of any tree's, so copious and so delicious 
to both sight and scent. The walker is frequently 
tempted to turn and linger near some more than 
usually handsome one, whose blossoms are two 
thirds expanded. How superior it is in these 
respects to the pear, whose blossoms are neither 
colored nor fragrant! 

By the middle of July, green apples are so 
large so as to remind us of coddling, and of the 
autumn. The sward is commonly strewed with 
little ones which fall stillborn, as it were, — 
Nature thus thinning them for us. The Roman 
writer Palladius said, — "If apples are inclined 
to fall before their time, a stone placed in a split 
root with retain them." Some such notion, still 
surviving, may account for some of the stones 
which we see placed to be overgrown in the forks 
of trees. They have a saying in Suffolk, Eng- 
land, — 

"At Michaelmas time, or a little before, 
Half an apple goes to the core." 

Early apples begin to be ripe about the first 
of August ; but I think that none of them are so 
good to eat as some to smell. One is worth more 
to scent your handkerchief with than any per- 



WILD APPLES 259 

fume which they sell in the shops. The fragrance 
of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with 
that of flowers. Some gnarly apple which I 
pick up in the road reminds me by its fragrance 
of all the wealth of Pomona, — carrying me for- 
ward to those days when they will be collected 
in golden and ruddy heaps in the orchards and 
about the cider-mills. 

A week or two later, as you are going by or- 
chards or gardens, especially in the evenings, 
you pass through a little region possessed by the 
fragrance of ripe apples, and thus enjoy them 
without price, and without robbing anybody. 

There is thus about all natural products a 
certain volatile and ethereal quality which repre- 
sents their highest value, and which cannot be 
vulgarized, or bought and sold. No mortal has 
ever enjoyed the perfect flavor of any fruit, and 
only the godlike among men begin to taste its 
ambrosial qualities. For nectar and ambrosia 
are only those fine flavors of every earthly fruit 
which our coarse palates fail to perceive, — just 
as we occupy the heaven of the gods without 
knowing it. When I see a particularly mean man 
carrying a load of fair and fragrant early apples 
to market, I seem to see a contest going on be- 
tween him and his horse, on the one side, and the 
apples on the other, and, to my mind, the apples 
always gain it. Pliny says that apples are the 
heaviest of all things, and that the oxen begin 



260 EXCURSIONS 

to sweat at the mere sight of a load of them. Our 
driver begins to lose his load the moment he tries 
to transport them to where they do not belong, 
that is, to any but the most beautiful. Though 
he gets out from time to time, and feels of them, 
and thinks they are all there, I see the stream of 
their evanescent and celestial qualities going to 
heaven from his cart, while the pulp and skin and 
core only are going to market. They are not 
apples, but pomace. Are not these still Iduna's 
apples, the taste of which keeps the gods forever 
young? and think you that they will let Loki or 
Thjassi carry them off to Jotunheim, while they 
grow wrinkled and gray? No, for Ragnarok or 
the destruction of the gods, is not yet. 

There is another thinning of the fruit, com- 
monly near the end of August or in September, 
when the ground is strewn with windfalls; and 
this happens especially when high winds occur 
after rain. In some orchards you may see fully 
three-quarters of the whole crop on the ground, 
lying in a circular form beneath the trees, yet 
hard and green,— or, if it is a hill-side, rolled far 
down the hill. However, it is an ill wind that 
blows nobody any good. All the country over, 
people are busy picking up the windfalls, and 
this will make them cheap for early apple-pies. 

In October, the leaves falling, the apples are 
more distinct on the trees. I saw one year in a 
neighboring town some trees fuller of fruit than 



WILD APPLES 261 

I remember to have ever seen before, small yel- 
low apples hanging over the road. The branches 
were gracefully drooping with their weight, like 
a barberry-bush, so that the whole tree acquired 
a new character. Even the topmost branches, 
instead of standing erect, spread and drooped 
in all directions; and there were so many poles 
supporting the lower ones, that they looked like 
pictures of banian-trees. As an old English 
manuscript says, "The mo appelen the tree 
bereth, the more sche boweth to the folk." 

Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits. Let 
the most beautiful or the swiftest have it. That 
should be the "going" price of apples. 

Between the fifth and twentieth of October I 
see the barrels lie under the trees. And per- 
haps I talk with one who is selecting some choice 
barrels to fulfil an order. He turns a specked 
one over many times before he leaves it out. If 
I were to tell what is passing in my mind, I 
should say that every one was specked which he 
had handled; for he rubs off all the bloom, and 
those fugacious ethereal qualities leave it. Cool 
evenings prompt the farmers to make haste, and 
at length I see only the ladders here and there 
left leaning against the trees. 

It would be well, if we accepted these gifts with 
more joy and gratitude, and did not think it 
enough simply to put a fresh load of compost 
about the tree. Some old English customs are 



262 EXCURSIONS 

suggestive at least. I find them described chiefly 
in Brand's "Popular Antiquities." It appears 
that "on Christmas eve the farmers and their men 
in Devonshire take a large bowl of cider, with a 
toast in it, and carrying it in state to the orchard, 
they salute the apple-trees with much ceremony, 
in order to make them bear well the next season." 
This salutation consists in "throwing some of the 
cider about the roots of the tree, placing bits of 
the toast on the branches," and then, "encircling 
one of the best bearing trees in the orchard, they 
drink the following toast three several times : — 

'Here's to thee, old apple-tree, 
Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow, 
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow! 

Hats-full! caps-full! 

Bushel, bushel, sacks-full! 

And my pockets full, too ! Hurra !' " 

Also what was called "apple-howling" used to 
be practised in various counties of England on 
New- Year's eve. A troop of boys visited the 
different orchards, and, encircling the apple- 
trees, repeated the following words: — 

"Stand fast, root! bear well, top! 
Pray God send us a good howling crop: 
Every twig, apples big; 
Every bow, apples enow!" 

"They then shout in chorus, one of the boys 
accompanying them on a cow's horn. During 



WILD APPLES 263 

this ceremony they rap the trees with their 
sticks." This is called "wassailing" the trees, and 
is thought by some to be "a relic of the heathen 
sacrifice to Pomona." 
Herrick sings: — 

"Wassaile the trees that they may beare 
You many a plum and many a peare; 
For more or less fruits they will bring 
As you so give them wassailing." 

Our poets have as yet a better right to sing of 
cider than of wine ; but it behooves them to sing 
better than English Phillips did, else they will 
do no credit to their Muse. 

THE WILD APPLE 

So much for the more civilized apple-trees (ur- 
baniores, as Pliny calls them). I love better to 
go through the old orchards of ungrafted apple- 
trees, at whatever season of the year, — so irregu- 
larly planted : sometimes two trees standing close 
together ; and the rows so devious that you would 
think that they not only had grown while the 
owner was sleeping, but had been set out by him 
in a somnambulic state. The rows of grafted 
fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them 
like these. But I now, alas, speak rather from 
memory than from any recent experience, such 
ravages have been made ! 

Some soils, like a rocky tract called the Easter- 



264 EXCURSIONS 

brooks Country in my neighborhood, are so suit- 
ed to the apple, that it will grow faster in them 
without any care, or if only the ground is broken 
up once a year, than it will in many places with 
any amount of care. The owners of this tract 
allow that the soil is excellent for fruit, but they 
say that it is so rocky that they have not patience 
to plough it, and that, together with the distance, 
is the reason why it is not cultivated. There are, 
or were recently, extensive orchards there stand- 
ing without order. Nay, they spring up wild and 
bear well there in the midst of pines, birches, 
maples, and oaks. I am often surprised to see 
rising amid these trees the rounded tops of apple- 
trees glowing with red or yellow fruit, in har- 
mony with the autumnal tints of the forest. 

Going up the side of a cliff about the first of 
November, I saw a vigorous young apple-tree, 
which, planted by birds or cows, had shot up 
amid the rocks and open woods there, and had 
now much fruit on it, uninjured by the frosts, 
when all cultivated apples were gathered. It 
was a rank wild growth, with many green leaves 
on it still, and made an impression of thorniness. 
The fruit was hard and green, but looked as if 
it would be palatable in the winter. Some was 
dangling on the twigs, but more half -buried in 
the wet leaves under the tree, or rolled far down 
the hill amid the rocks. The owner knows noth- 







*3 



^ 

N 



WILD APPLES 265 

ing of it. The day was not observed when it 
first blossomed, nor when it first bore fruit, unless 
by the chicadee. There was no dancing on the 
green beneath it in its honor, and now there is 
no hand to pluck its fruit, — which is only gnawed 
by squirrels, as I perceive. It has done double 
duty, — not only borne this crop, but each twig 
has grown a foot into the air. And this is such 
fruit! bigger than many berries, we must admit, 
and carried home will be sound and palatable 
next spring. What care I for Iduna's apples 
so long as I can get these? 

When I go by this shrub thus late and hardy, 
and see its dangling fruit, I respect the tree, and 
I am grateful for Nature's bounty, even though 
I cannot eat it. Here on this rugged and woody 
hill-side has grown an apple-tree, not planted by 
man, no relic of a former orchard, but a natural 
growth, like the pines and oaks. Most fruits 
which we prize and use depend entirely on our 
care. Corn and grain, potatoes, peaches, melons, 
etc., depend altogether on our planting; but the 
apple emulates man's independence and enter- 
prise. It is not simply carried, as I have said, 
but, like him, to some extent, it has migrated to 
this New World, and is even, here and there, 
making its way amid the aboriginal trees; just 
as the ox and dog and horse sometimes run wild 
and maintain themselves. 



266 EXCURSIONS 

Even the sourest and crabbedest apple, grow- 
ing in the most unfavorable position, suggests 
such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit. 

THE CRAB 

Nevertheless, our wild apple is wild only like 
myself, perchance, who belong not to the aborig- 
inal race here, but have strayed into the woods 
from the cultivated stock. Wilder still, as I have 
said, there grows elsewhere in this country a 
native and aboriginal Crab- Apple, Malus coro- 
naria, "whose nature has not yet been modified 
by cultivation." It is found from Western New 
York to Minnesota, and southward. Michaux 
says that its ordinary height "is fifteen or eigh- 
teen feet, but it is sometimes found twenty-five 
or thirty feet high," and that the large ones "ex- 
actly resemble the common apple-tree." "The 
flowers are white mingled with rose-color, and 
are collected in corymbs." They are remarkable 
for their delicious odor. The fruit, according 
to him, is about an inch and a half in diameter,_ 
and is intensely acid. Yet they make fine sweet- 
meats, and also cider of them. He concludes, 
that "if, on being cultivated, it does not yield new 
and palatable varieties, it will at least be cele- 
brated for the beauty of its flowers, and for the 
sweetness of its perfume." 

I never saw the Crab- Apple till May, 1861. I 
had heard of it through Michaux, but more mod- 



WILD APPLES 267 

ern botanists, so far as I know, have not treated 
it as of any peculiar importance. Thus it was 
a half-fabulous tree to me. I contemplated a 
pilgrimage to the "Glades," a portion of Penn- 
sylvania where it was said to grow to perfection. 
I thought of sending to a nursery for it, but 
doubted if they had it, or would distinguish it 
from European varieties. At last I had occasion 
to go to Minnesota, and on entering Michigan I 
began to notice from the cars a tree with hand- 
some rose-colored flowers. At first I thought it 
some variety of thorn ; but it was not long before 
the truth flashed on me, that this was my long- 
sought Crab-Apple. It was the prevailing flow- 
ering shrub or tree to be seen from the cars at 
that season of the year, — about the middle of 
May. But the cars never stopped before one, 
and so I was launched on the bosom of the Mis- 
sissippi without having touched one, experien- 
cing the fate of Tantalus. On arriving at St. 
Anthony's Falls, I was sorry to be told that I was 
too far north for the Crab-Apple. Nevertheless 
I succeeded in finding it about eight miles west of 
the Falls ; touched it and smelled it, and secured a 
lingering corymb of flowers for my herbarium. 
This must have been near its northern limit. 

HOW THE WILD APPLE GROWS 

But though these are indigenous, like the In- 
dians, I doubt whether they are any hardier than 



268 EXCURSIONS 

those backwoodsmen among the apple-trees, 
which, though descended from cultivated stocks, 
plant themselves in distant fields and forests, 
where the soil is favorable to them. I know of no 
trees which have more difficulties to contend with, 
and which more sturdily resist their foes. These 
are the ones whose story we have to tell. It 
oftentimes reads thus: — 

Near the beginning of May, we notice little 
thickets of apple-trees just springing up in the 
pastures where cattle have been, — as the rocky 
ones of our Easterbrooks Country, or the top 
of Nobscot Hill, in Sudbury. One or two of 
these perhaps survive the drought and other acci- 
dents, — their very birthplace defending them 
against the encroaching grass and some other 
dangers, at first. 

In two years' time 5 t had thus 
Reached the level of the rocks, 

Admired the stretching world, 
Nor feared the wandering flocks. 

But at this tender age 

Its sufferings began: 
There came a browsing ox 

And cut it down a span. 

This time, perhaps, the ox does not notice it amid 
the grass; but the next year, when it has grown 
more stout, he recognizes it for a fellow- emigrant 
from the old country, the flavor of whose leaves 



WILD APPLES 269 

and twigs he well knows ; and though at first he 
pauses to welcome it, and express his surprise, 
and gets for answer, "The same cause that 
brought you here brought me," he nevertheless 
browses it again, reflecting, it may be, that he 
has some title to it. 

Thus cut down annually, it does not despair; 
but, putting forth two short twigs for every one 
cut off, it spreads out low along the ground in 
the hollows or between the rocks, growing more 
stout and scrubby, until it forms, not a tree as 
yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff, twiggy mass, 
almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock. Some 
of the densest and most impenetrable clumps of 
bushes that I have ever seen, as well on account 
of the closeness and stubbornness of their 
branches as of their thorns, have been these wild- 
apple scrubs. They are more like the scrubby 
fir and black spruce on which you stand, and 
sometimes walk, on the tops of mountains, where 
cold is the demon they contend with, than any- 
thing else. No wonder they are prompted to 
grow thorns at last, to defend themselves against 
such foes. In their thorniness, however, there is 
no malice, only some malic acid. 

The rocky pastures of the tract I have referred 
to, — for they maintain their ground best in a 
rocky field, — are thickly sprinkled with these 
little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid 
gray mosses or lichens, and you see thousands of 



270 EXCURSIONS 

little trees just springing up between them, with 
the seed still attached to them. 

Being regularly clipped all around each year 
by the cows, as a hedge with shears, they are 
often of a perfect conical or pyramidal form, 
from one to four feet high, and more or less 
sharp, as if trimmed by the gardener's art. In 
the pastures on JSTobscot Hill and its spurs, they 
make fine dark shadows when the sun is low. 
They are also an excellent covert from hawks for 
many small birds that roost and build in them. 
Whole flocks perch in them at night, and I have 
seen three robins' nests in one which was six feet 
in diameter. 

No doubt many of these are already old trees, 
if you reckon from the day they were planted, 
but infants still when you consider their devel- 
opment and the long life before them. I counted 
the annual rings of some which were just one 
foot high, and as wide as high, and found that 
they were about twelve years old, but quite 
sound and thrifty! They were so low that they 
were unnoticed by the walker, while many of 
their contemporaries from the nurseries were al- 
ready bearing considerable crops. But what you 
gain in time is perhaps in this case, too, lost in 
power, — that is, in the vigor of the tree. This 
is their pyramidal state. 

.The cows continue to browse them thus for 
twenty years or more, keeping them down and 



WILD APPLES 271 

compelling them to spread, until at last they are 
so broad that they become their own fence, when 
some interior shoot, which their foes cannot reach, 
darts upward with joy: for it has not forgotten 
its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit 
in triumph. 

Such are the tactics by which it finally defeats 
its bovine foes. Now, if you have watched the 
progress of a particular shrub, you will see that 
it is no longer a simple pyramid or cone, but that 
out of its apex there rises a sprig or two, growing 
more lustily perchance than an orchard tree, 
since the plant now devotes the whole of its re- 
pressed energy to these upright parts. In a 
short time these become a small tree, an inverted 
pyramid resting on the apex of the other, so that 
the whole has now the form of a vast hour-glass. 
The spreading bottom, having served its pur- 
pose, finally disappears, and the generous tree 
permits the now harmless cows to come in and 
stand in its shade, and rub against and redden its 
trunk, which has grown in spite of them, and even 
to taste a part of its fruit, and so disperse the 
seed. 

Thus the cows create their own shade and 
food ; and the tree, its hour-glass being inverted, 
lives a second life, as it were. 

It is an important question with some nowa- 
days, whether you should trim young apple- 
trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes. 



272 EXCURSIONS 

The ox trims them up as high as he can reach, 
and that is about the right height, I think. 

In spite of wandering kine, and other adverse 
circumstances, that despised shrub, valued only 
by small birds as a covert and shelter from hawks, 
has its blossom-week at last, and in course of 
time its harvest, sincere, though small. 

By the end of some October, when its leaves 
have fallen, I frequently see such a central sprig, 
whose progress I have watched, when I thought 
it had forgotten its destiny, as I had, bearing its 
first crop of small green or yellow or rosy fruit, 
which the cows cannot get at over the bushy and 
thorny hedge which surrounds it, and I make 
haste to taste the new and undescribed variety. 
We have all heard of the numerous varieties of 
fruit invented by Van Mons and Knight. This 
is the system of Van Cow, and she has invented 
far more and more memorable varieties than both 
of them. 

Through what hardships it may attain to bear 
a sweet fruit! Though somewhat small, it may 
prove equal, if not superior, in flavor to that 
which has grown in a garden, — will perchance be 
all the sweeter and more palatable for the very 
difficulties it has had to contend with. Who 
knows but this chance wild fruit, planted by a 
cow or a bird on some remote and rocky hill-side, 
where it is as yet unobserved by man, may be the 
choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates 



WILD APPLES 273 

shall hear of it, and royal societies seek to propa- 
gate it, though the virtues of the perhaps truly 
crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of, 
— at least, beyond the limits of his village? It 
was thus the Porter and the Baldwin grew. 

Every wild-apple shrub excites our expecta- 
tion thus, somewhat as every wild child. It is, 
perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to 
man ! So are human beings, referred to the high- 
est standard, the celestial fruit which they sug- 
gest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate ; and 
only the most persistent and strongest genius de- 
fends itself and prevails, sends a tender scion up- 
ward at last, and drops its perfect fruit on the 
ungrateful earth. Poets and philosophers and 
statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, 
and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men. 

Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The 
celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesper- 
ides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed 
dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Her- 
culean labor to pluck them. 

This is one, and the most remarkable wav, in 
which the wild apple is propagated; but com- 
monly it springs up at wide intervals in woods 
and swamps, and by the sides of roads, as the 
soil may suit it, and grows with comparative 
rapidity. Those which grow in dense woods are 
very tall and slender. I frequently pluck from 
these trees a perfectly mild and tanned fruit. As 



274 EXCURSIONS 

Palladius says, "Et injussu const ernitur ubere 
mali" : And the ground is strewn with the fruit 
of an unbidden apple-tree. 

It is an old notion, that, if these wild trees do 
not bear a valuable fruit of their own, they are 
the best stocks by which to transmit to posterity 
the most highly prized qualities of others. How- 
ever, I am not in search of stocks, but the wild 
fruit itself, whose fierce gust has suffered no 
"inteneration." It is not my 

"highest plot 
To plant the Bergamot." 

THE FRUIT, AND ITS FLAVOR 

The time for wild apples is the last of October 
and the first of November. They then get to be 
palatable, for they ripen late, and they are still 
perhaps as beautiful as ever. I make a great 
account of these fruits, which the farmers do not 
think it worth the while to gather, — wild flavors 
of the Muse, vivacious and inspiriting. The 
farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels, but 
he is mistaken, unless he has a walker's appetite 
and imagination, neither of which can he have. 

Such as grow quite wild, and are left out till 
the first of November, I presume that the owner 
does not mean to gather. They belong to chil- 
dren as wild as themselves, — to certain active 
boys that I know, — to the wild-eyed woman of 
the fields, to whom nothing comes amiss, who 
gleans after all the world, — and, moreover, to 



WILD APPLES 275 

us walkers. We have met with them, and they 
are ours. These rights, long enough insisted up- 
on, have come to be an institution in some old 
countries, where they have learned how to live. 
I hear that "the custom of grippling, which may 
be called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly, 
practised in Herefordshire. It consists in leav- 
ing a few apples, which are called the gripples, on 
every tree, after the general gathering, for the 
boys, who go with climbing-poles and bags to 
collect them." 

As for those I speak of, I pluck them as a wild 
fruit, native to this quarter of the earth, — fruit of 
old trees that have been dying ever since I was a 
boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the 
woodpecker and the squirrel, deserted now by 
the owner, who has not faith enough to look 
under their boughs. From the appearance of the 
tree-top, at a little distance, you would expect 
nothing but lichens to drop from it, but your 
faith is rewarded by finding the ground strewn 
with spirited fruit, — some of it, perhaps, col- 
lected at squirrel-holes, with the marks of their 
teeth by which they carried them, — some con- 
taining a cricket or two silently feeding within, 
and some, especially in damp days, a shelless 
snail. The very sticks and stones lodged in the 
tree-top might have convinced you of the savori- 
ness of the fruit which has been so eagerly sought 
after in past years. 



276 EXCURSIONS 

I have seen no account of these among the 
"Fruits and Fruit- Trees of America," though 
they are more memorable to my taste than the 
grafted kinds; more racy and wild American 
flavors do they possess, when October and 
November, when December and January, and 
perhaps February and March even, have as- 
suaged them somewhat. An old farmer in my 
neighborhood, who always selects the right word, 
says that: "they have a kind of bow-arrow tang." 

Apples for grafting appear to have been se- 
lected commonly, not so much for their spirited 
flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and bear- 
ing qualities, — not so much for their beauty, as 
for their fairness and soundness. Indeed, I have 
no faith in the selected lists of pomological gen- 
tlemen. Their "Favorites" and "None-suches" 
and "Seek-no-farthers," when I have fruited 
them, commonly turn out very tame and forget- 
able. They are eaten with comparatively little 
zest, and have no real tang nor smack to them. 

What if some of these wildings are acrid and 
puckery, genuine verjuice, do they not still be- 
long to the Pomacece, which are uniformly in- 
nocent and kind to our race? I still begrudge 
them to the cider-mill. Perhaps they are not 
fairly ripe yet. 

No wonder that these small and high-colored 
apples are thought to make the best cider. Lou- 
don quotes from the "Herefordshire Report," 




An old farmer 



WILD APPLES 277 

that "apples of a small size are always, if equal 
in .quality, to be preferred to those of larger size, 
in order that the rind and kernel may bear the 
greatest proportion to the pulp, which affords 
the weakest and most watery juice." And he 
says, that, "to prove this, Dr. Symonds of Here- 
ford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of 
cider entirely from the rinds and cores of apples, 
and another from the pulp only, when the first 
was found of extraordinary strength and flavor, 
while the latter was sweet and insipid." 

Evelyn says that the "Red-strake" was the 
favorite cider-apple in his day ; and he quotes one 
Dr. Newburg as saying, "In Jersey 't is a gen- 
eral observation, as I hear, that the more of red 
any apple has in its rind, the more proper it is 
for this use. Pale-faced apples they exclude 
as much as may be from their cider-vat." This 
opinion still prevails. 

All apples are good in November. Those 
which the farmer leaves out as unsalable, and un- 
palatable to those who frequent the markets, are 
choicest fruit to the walker. But it is remarkable 
that the wild apple, which I praise as so spirited 
and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being 
brought into the house, has frequently a harsh 
and crabbed taste. The Saunterer's Apple not 
even the saunterer can eat in the house. The 
palate rejects it there, as it does haws and acorns, 
and demands a tame one ; for there you miss the 



278 EXCURSIONS 

November air, which is the sauce it is to be eaten 
with. Accordingly, when Tityrus, seeing the 
lengthening shadows, invites Meliboeus to go 
home and pass the night with him, he promises 
him mild apples and soft chestnuts, — mitia poma, 
castanece molles. I frequently pluck wild apples 
of so rich and spicy a flavor that I wonder all 
orchardists do not get a scion from that tree, and 
I fail not to bring home my pockets full. But 
perchance, when I take one out of my desk and 
taste it in my chamber, I find it unexpectedly 
crude, — sour enough to set a squirrel's teeth on 
edge and make a jay scream. 

These apples have hung in the wind and frost 
and rain till they have absorbed the qualities of 
the weather or season, and thus are highly sea- 
soned, and they pierce and sting and permeate us 
with their spirit. They must be eaten in season, 
accordingly, — that is, out-of-doors. 

To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of 
these October fruits, it is necessary that you be 
breathing the sharp October or November air. 
The out-door air and exercise which the walker 
gets give a different tone to his palate, and he 
craves a fruit which the sedentary would call 
harsh and crabbed. They must be eaten in the 
fields, when your system is all aglow with exer- 
cise, when the frosty weather nips your fingers, 
the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles the 
few remaining leaves, and the jay is heard 



WILD APPLES 279 

screaming around. What is sour in the house 
a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these ap- 
ples might be labelled, "To be eaten in the wind." 

Of course no flavors are thrown away; they 
are intended for the taste that is up to them. 
Some apples have two distinct flavors, and per- 
haps one-half of them must be eaten in the house, 
the other out-doors. One Peter Whitney wrote 
from Northborough in 1782, for the Proceed- 
ings of the Boston Academy, describing an ap- 
ple- tree in that town "producing fruit of oppo- 
site qualities, part of the same apple being fre- 
quently sour and the other sweet" ; also some all 
sour, and others all sweet, and this diversity on 
all parts of the tree. 

There is a wild apple on Nawshawtuck Hill in 
my town which has to me a peculiarly pleasant 
bitter tang, not perceived till it is three-quarters 
tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you eat 
it, it smells exactly like a squash-bug. It is a sort 
of triumph to eat and relish it. 

I hear that the fruit of a kind of plum-tree in 
Provence is "called Prunes sibarelles, because it 
is impossible to whistle after having eaten them, 
from their sourness." But perhaps they were 
only eaten in the house and in summer, and if 
tried out-of-doors in a stinging atmosphere, who 
knows but you could whistle an octave higher 
and clearer? 

In the fields only are the sours and bitters of 



280 EXCURSIONS 

Nature appreciated; just as the wood-chopper 
eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle of 
a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray 
there and dreams of summer in a degree of cold 
which, experienced in a chamber, would make a 
student miserable. They who are at work 
abroad are not cold, but rather it is they who sit 
shivering in houses. As with temperatures, so 
with flavors; as with cold and heat, so with sour 
and sweet. This natural raciness, the sours and 
bitters which the diseased palate refuses, are the 
true condiments. 

Let your condiments be in the condition of 
your senses. To appreciate the flavor of these 
wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses, 
papillce firm and erect on the tongue and palate, 
not easily flattened and tamed. 

From my experience with wild apples, I can 
understand that there may be reason for a sav- 
age's preferring many kinds of food which the 
civilized man rejects. The former has the palate 
of an out-door man. It takes a savage or wild 
taste to appreciate a wild fruit. 

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes 
to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, 
then! 

"Nor is it every apple I desire, 

Nor that which pleases every palate best; 
'T is not the lasting Deuxan I require, 

Nor yet the red-cheeked Greening I request, 




The wood-chopper' 1 's dinner 



WILD APPLES 281 

Nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife, 
Nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife: 
No, no ! bring me an apple from the tree of life." 

So there is one thought for the field, another 
for the house. I would have my thoughts, like 
wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not 
warrant them to be palatable, if tasted in the 
house. 

THEIR BEAUTY 

Almost all wild apples are handsome. They 
cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to 
look at. The gnarliest will have some redeem- 
ing traits even to the eye. You will discover 
some evening redness dashed or sprinkled on 
some protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare 
that the summer lets an apple go without streak- 
ing or spotting it on some part of its sphere. It 
will have some red stains, commemorating the 
mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some 
dark and rusty blotches, in memory of the clouds 
and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over 
it; and a spacious field of green reflecting the 
general face of Nature, — green even as the fields ; 
or a yellow ground, which implies a milder flavor, 
— vellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills. 

Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair, — 
apples not of Discord, but of Concord ! Yet not 
so rare but that the homeliest may have a share. 
Painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright 



282 EXCURSIONS 

yellow, or red, or crimson, as if their spheres had 
regularly revolved, and enjoyed the influence of 
the sun on all sides alike, — some with the faintest 
pink blush imaginable, — some brindled with 
deep red streaks like a cow, or with hundreds 
of fine blood-red rays running regularly from 
the stem-dimple to the blossom-end, like me- 
ridional lines, on a straw-colored ground, — 
some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine 
lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or 
eyes more or less confluent and fiery when wet, — 
and others gnarly, and freckled or peppered all 
over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on 
a white ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from 
the brush of Him who paints the autumn leaves. 
Others, again, are sometimes red inside, perfused 
with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful 
to eat, — apple of the Hesperides, apple of the 
evening sky! But like shells and pebbles on 
the sea-shore, they must be seen as they sparkle 
amid the withering leaves in some dell in the 
woods, in the autumnal air, or as they lie in the 
wet grass, and not when they have wilted and 
faded in the house. 

THE NAMING OF THEM 

It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable 
names for the hundred varieties which go to a 
single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not tax 



WILD APPLES 283 

a man's invention, — no one to be named after a 
man, and all in the lingua vernacula? Who shall 
stand godfather at the christening of the wild 
apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek 
languages, if they were used, and make the lingua 
vernacula flag. We should have to call in the 
sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the 
autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the 
woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel 
and the jay and the butterfly, the November 
traveller and the truant boy, to our aid. 

In 1836 there were in the garden of the Lon- 
don Horticultural Society more than fourteen 
hundred distinct sorts. But here are species 
which they have not in their catalogue, not to 
mention the varieties which our Crab might yield 
to cultivation. 

Let us enumerate a few of these. I find my- 
self compelled, after, all, to give the Latin names 
of some for the benefit of those who live where 
English is not spoken, — for they are likely to 
have a world-wide reputation. 

There is, first of all, the Wood- Apple (Malus 
sylvatica) ; the Blue- Jay Apple; the Apple which 
grows in Dells in the Woods, (sylvestrivallis,) 
also in Hollows in Pastures (campestrivallis) ; 
the Apple that grows in an old Cellar-Hole 
(Malus Cellaris) ; the Meado w- Apple ; the Part- 
ridge-Apple; the Truant's Apple, (Cessatoris,) 



284 EXCURSIONS 

which no boy will ever go by without knocking off 
some, however late it may be; the Saunterer's 
Apple, — you must lose yourself before you can 
find the way to that; the Beauty of the Air 
(Decus Aeris) ; December-Eating; the Frozen- 
Thawed (gelato-soluta) , good only in that state; 
the Concord Apple, possibly the same with the 
Musket- aquidensis ; the Assabet Apple; the 
Brindled Apple ; the Wine of New England ; the 
Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple (Malus 
viridis) ; — this has many synonyms; in an im- 
perfect state, it is the Cholera morbifera aut 
dysenterijera, puerulis dilectissima; — the Apple 
which Atalanta stopped to pick up ; the Hedge- 
Apple {Malus Sepium) ; the Slug- Apple 
(limacea) ; the Railroad- Apple, which perhaps 
came from a core thrown out of the cars; the 
Apple whose Fruit we tasted in our Youth; our 
Particular Apple, not to be found in any cata- 
logue, — Pedestrium Solatium; also the Apple 
where hangs the Forgotten Scythe; Iduna's 
Apples, and the Apples which Loki found in the 
Wood; and a great many more I have on my 
list, too numerous to mention, — all of them good. 
As Bodgeus exclaims, referring to the cultivated 
kinds, and adapting Virgil to his case, so I, 
adapting Bodseus, — 

"Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, 
An iron voice, could I describe all the forms 
And reckon up all the names of these wild apples." 



WILD APPLES 285 



THE LAST GLEANING 



By the middle of November the wild apples 
have lost some of their brilliancy, and have chiefly 
fallen. A great part are decayed on the ground, 
and the sound ones are more palatable than be- 
fore. The note of the chicadee sounds now more 
distinct, as you wander amid the old trees, and 
the autumnal dandelion is half-closed and tear- 
ful. But still, if you are a skilful gleaner, you 
may get many a pocketfull even of grafted fruit, 
long after apples are supposed to be gone out- 
of-doors. I know a Blue-Pearmain tree, grow- 
ing within the edge of a swamp, almost as good 
as wild. You would not suppose that there was 
any fruit left there, on the first survey, but you 
must look according to system. Those which lie 
exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or per- 
chance a few still show one blooming cheek here 
and there amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, 
with experienced eyes, I explore amid the bare 
alders and the huckleberry-bushes and the 
withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, 
which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen 
and decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder 
leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know 
that they lie concealed, fallen into hollows long 
since and covered up by the leaves of the tree 
itself, — a proper kind of packing. Prom these 
lurking-places, anywhere within the circumfer- 



286 EXCURSIONS 

ence of the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet 
and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hol- 
lowed out by crickets and perhaps with a leaf or 
two cemented to it (as Curzon an old manuscript 
from a monastery's mouldy cellar), but still with 
a rich bloom on it, and at least as ripe and well 
kept, if not better than those in barrels, more 
crisp and lively than they. If these resources 
fail to yield anything, I have learned to look 
between the bases of the suckers which spring 
thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and 
then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an 
alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves, 
safe from cows which may have smelled them out. 
If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the Blue- 
Pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side ; and as 
I retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being per- 
haps four or five miles from home, I eat one first 
from this side, and then from that, to keep my 
balance. 

I learn from Topsell's Gesner, whose author- 
ity appears to be Albertus, that the following is 
the way in which the hedgehog collects and car- 
ries home his apples. He says, — "His meat is 
apples, worms, or grapes : when he findeth apples 
or grapes on the earth, he rolleth himself upon 
them, until he have filled all his prickles, and 
then carrieth them home to his den, never bear- 
ing above one in his mouth ; and if it fortune that 
one of them fall off by the way, he likewise 



WILD APPLES 287 

shaketh off all the residue, and walloweth upon 
them afresh, until they be all settled upon his 
back again. So, forth he goeth, making a noise 
like a cart-wheel ; and if he have any young ones 
in his nest, they pull off his load wherewithal he 
is loaded, eating thereof what they please, and 
laying up the residue for the time to come." 

THE ^FROZEN-THAWED^ APPLE 

Toward the end of November, though some of 
the sound ones are yet more mellow and perhaps 
more edible, they have generally, like the leaves, 
lost their beauty, and are beginning to freeze. 
It is finger-cold, and prudent farmers get in their 
barrelled apples, and bring you the apples and 
cider which they have engaged; for it is time to 
put them into the cellar. Perhaps a few on the 
ground show their red cheeks above the early 
snow, and occasionally some even preserve their 
color and soundness under the snow throughout 
the winter. But generally at the beginning of 
the winter they freeze hard, and soon, though 
undecayed, acquire the color of a baked apple. 

Before the end of December, generally, they 
experience their first thawing. Those which a 
month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite unpal- 
atable to the civilized taste, such at least as were 
frozen while sound, let a warmer sun come to 
thaw them, for they are extremely sensitive to 
its rays, are found to be filled with a rich, sweet 



288 EXCURSIONS 

cider, better than any bottled cider that I know 
of, and with which I am better acquainted than 
with wine. All apples are good in this state, and 
your jaws are the cider-press. Others, which 
have more substance, are a sweet and luscious 
food, — in my opinion of more worth than the 
pine-apples which are imported from the West 
Indies. Those which lately even I tasted only 
to repent of it, — for I am semi-civilized, — which 
the farmer willingly left on the tree, I am now 
glad to find have the property of hanging on like 
the leaves of the young oaks. It is a way to 
keep cider sweet without boiling. Let the frost 
come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and 
then the rain or a warm winter day to thaw 
them, and they will seem to have borrowed a 
flavor from heaven through the medium of the 
air in which they hang. Or perchance you find, 
when you get home, that those which rattled in 
your pocket have thawed, and the ice is turned 
to cider. But after the third or fourth freezing 
and thawing they will not be found so good. 

What are the imported half-ripe fruits of the 
torrid South, to this fruit matured by the cold of 
the frigid North? These are those crabbed apples 
with which I cheated my companion, and kept 
a smooth face that I might tempt him to eat. 
Now we both greedily fill our pockets with them, 
— bending to drink the cup and save our lappets 
from the overflowing juice, — and grow more 



WILD APPLES 289 

social with their wine. Was there one that hung 
so high and sheltered by the tangled branches 
that our sticks could not dislodge it? 

It is a fruit never carried to market, that I am 
aware of, — quite distinct from the apple of the 
markets, as from dried apple and cider, — and 
it is not every winter that produces it in perfec- 
tion. 

The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. 
It is a fruit which will probably become extinct 
in New England. You may still wander through 
old orchards of native fruit of great extent, which 
for the most part went to the cider-mill, now all 
gone to decay. I have heard of an orchard in a 
distant town, on the side of a hill, where the 
apples rolled down and lay four feet deep 
against a wall on the lower side, and this the 
owner cut down for fear they should be made 
into cider. Since the temperance reform and the 
general introduction of grafted fruit, no native 
apple-trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted 
pastures, and where the woods have grown up 
around them, are set out. I fear that he who 
walks over these fields a century hence will not 
know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. 
Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which 
he will not know! Notwithstanding the preva- 
lence of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if 
so extensive orchards are set out to-day in my 



290 EXCURSIONS 

town as there were a century ago, when those 
vast straggling cider-orchards were planted, 
when men both ate and drank apples, when the 
pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees 
cost nothing but the trouble of setting them out. 
Men could afford then to stick a tree by every 
wall-side and let it take its chance. I see no- 
body planting trees to-day in such out-of-the- 
way places, along the lonely roads and lanes, and 
at the bottom of dells in the wood. Now that 
they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them, 
they collect them into a plat by their houses, and 
fence them in, — and the end of it all will be that 
we shall be compelled to look for our apples in 
a barrel. 

This is "The word of the Lord that came to 
Joel the son of Pethuel. 

"Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye 
inhabitants of the land ! Hath this been in your 
days, or even the days of your fathers? .... 

"That which the palmer- worm hath left hath 
the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath 
left hath the canker-worm eaten; and that which 
the canker-worm hath left hath the caterpillar 
eaten. 

"Awake, ye drunkards, and weep! and howl, 
all ye drinkers of wine, because of the new wine ! 
for it is cut off from your mouth. 

"For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, 
and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of 



WILD APPLES 291 

a lion, and he hath the cheek-teeth of a great 
lion. 

"He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my 
fig-tree; he hath made it clean bare, and cast it 
away; the branches thereof are made white. . . . 

"Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen! howl, O 
ye vine-dressers! .... 

"The vine is dried up, and the fig-tree lan- 
guisheth; the pomegranate-tree, the palm-tree 
also, and the apple-tree, even all the trees of the 
field, are withered: because joy is withered away 
from the sons of men." 



NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT 

CHANCING to take a memorable walk 
by moonlight some years ago, I resolved 
to take more such walks, and make ac- 
quaintance with another side of nature: I have 
done so. 

According to Pliny, there is a stone in Arabia 
called Selenites, "wherein is a white, which in- 
creases and decreases with the moon." My jour- 
nal for the last year or two, has been selenitic 
in this sense. 

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to 
most of us ? Are we not tempted to explore it, — 
to penetrate to the shores of its lake Tchad, and 
discover the source of its Nile, perchance the 
Mountains of the Moon ? Who knows what fer- 
tility and beauty, moral and natural, are there 
to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in 
the Central Africa of the night, there is where 
all Niles have their hidden heads. The expedi- 
tions up the Nile as yet extend but to the 
Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the 
White Nile; but it is the Black Nile that con- 
cerns us. 

I shall be a benefactor if I conquer some realms 

292 



NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT 293 

from the night, if I report to the gazettes any- 
thing transpiring about us at that season worthy 
of their attention, — if I can show men that there 
is some beauty awake while they are asleep, — if 
I add to the domains of poetry. 

Night is certainly more novel and less profane 
than day. I soon discovered that I was ac- 
quainted only with its complexion, and as for the 
moon, I had seen her only as it were through a 
crevice in a shutter, occasionally. Why not 
walk a little way in her light ? 

Suppose you attend to the suggestions which 
the moon makes for one month, commonly in 
vain, will it not be very different from anything 
in literature or religion? But why not study 
this Sanscrit? What if one moon has come and 
gone with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, 
its oracular suggestions, — so divine a creature 
freighted with hints for me, and I have not used 
her? One moon gone by unnoticed? 

I think it was Dr. Chalmers who said, criticis- 
ing Coleridge, that for his part he wanted ideas 
which he could see all round, and not such as he 
must look at away up in the heavens. Such a 
man, one would say, would never look at the 
moon, because she never turns her other side to 
us. The light which comes from ideas which have 
their orbit as distant from the earth, and which 
is no less cheering and enlightening to the be- 
nighted traveller than that of the moon and stars, 



294 EXCURSIONS 

is naturally reproached or nicknamed as moon- 
shine by such. They are moonshine, are they? 
Well, then do your night-travelling when there 
is no moon to light you; but I will be thankful 
for the light that reaches me from the star of 
least magnitude. Stars are lesser or greater 
only as they appear to us so. I will be thank- 
ful that I see so much as one side of a celestial 
idea, — one side of the rainbow, — and the sun- 
set sky. 

Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if 
they knew its qualities very well, and despised 
them; as owls might talk of sunshine. None of 
your sunshine, — but this word commonly means 
merely something which they do not understand, 
— which they are abed and asleep to, however 
much it may be worth their while to be up and 
awake to it. 

It must be allowed that the light of the moon, 
sufficient though it is for the pensive walker, and 
not disproportionate to the inner light we have, 
is very inferior in quality and intensity to that 
of the sun. But the moon is not to be judged 
alone by the quantity of light she sends to us, 
but also by her influence on the earth and its in- 
habitants. "The moon gravitates toward the 
earth, and the earth reciprocally toward the 
moon." The poet who walks by moonlight is 
conscious of a tide in his thought which is to 
be referred to lunar influence. I will endeavor 



NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT 295 

to separate the tide in my thoughts from the cur- 
rent distractions of the day. I would warn my 
hearers that they must not try my thoughts by 
a daylight standard, but endeavor to realize that 
I speak out of the night. All depends on your 
point of view. In Drake's "Collection of Voy- 
ages," Wafer says of some Albinoes among the 
Indians of Darien, "They are quite white, but 
their whiteness is like that of a horse, quite dif- 
ferent from the fair or pale European, as they 
have not the least tincture of a blush or sanguine 
complexion. . . . Their eyebrows are milk- 
white, as is likewise the hair of their heads, which 
is very fine. . . . They seldom go abroad in 
the daytime, the sun being disagreeable to them, 
and causing their eyes, which are weak and por- 
ing, to water, especially if it shines toward them, 
yet they see very well by moonlight, from which 
we call them moon-eyed." 

Neither in our thoughts in these moonlight 
walks, methinks, is there "the least tincture of a 
blush or sanguine complexion," but we are intel- 
lectually and morally Albinoes, — children of 
Endymion, — such is the effect of conversing 
much with the moon. 

I complain of Arctic voyagers that they do 
not enough remind us of the constant peculiar 
dreariness of the scenery, and the perpetual twi- 
light of the Arctic night. So he whose theme is 
moonlight, though he may find it difficult, must, 



296 EXCURSIONS 

as it were, illustrate it with the light of the moon 
alone. 

Many men walk by day ; few walk by night. It 
is a very different season. Take a July night, 
for instance. About ten o'clock, — when man is 
asleep, and day fairly forgotten, — the beauty of 
moonlight is seen over lonely pastures where 
cattle are silently feeding. On all sides novelties 
present themselves. Instead of the sun there 
are the moon and stars, instead of the wood- 
thrush there is the whip-poor-will, — instead of 
butterflies in the meadows, fire-flies, winged 
sparks of fire ! who would have believed it ? What 
kind of cool deliberate life dwells in those dewy 
abodes associated with a spark of fire? So man 
has fire in his eyes, or blood, or brain. Instead 
of singing birds, the half-throttled note of a 
cuckoo flying over, the croaking of frogs, and 
the intenser dream of crickets. But above all, 
the wonderful trump of the bull-frog, ringing 
from Maine to Georgia. The potato-vines stand 
upright, the corn grows apace, the bushes loom, 
the grain-fields are boundless. On our open 
river terraces once cultivated by the Indian, they 
appear to occupy the ground like an army, — 
their heads nodding in the breeze. Small trees 
and shrubs are seen in the midst, overwhelmed as 
by an inundation. The shadows of rocks and 
trees, and shrubs and hills, are more conspicu- 




ss 

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.^0 



NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT 297 

ous than the objects themselves. The slightest 
irregularities in the ground are revealed by the 
shadows, and what the feet find comparatively 
smooth, appears rough and diversified in con- 
sequence. For the same reason the whole land- 
scape is more variegated and picturesque than 
by day. The smallest recesses in the rocks are 
dim and cavernous; the ferns in the wood ap- 
pear of tropical size. The sweet fern and indigo 
in overgrown wood-paths wet you with dew up 
to your middle. The leaves of the shrub-oak are 
shining as if a liquid were flowing over them. 
The pools seen through the trees are as full of 
light as the sky. "The light of the day takes 
refuge in their bosoms," as the Pur ana says of 
the ocean. All white objects are more remark- 
able than by day. A distant cliff looks like a 
phosphorescent space on a hill-side. The woods 
are heavy and dark. Nature slumbers. You see 
the moonlight reflected from particular stumps in 
the recesses of the forest, as if she selected what 
to shine on. These small fractions of her light 
remind one of the plant called moon-seed, — as 
if the moon were sowing it in such places. 

In the night the eyes are partly closed or retire 
into the head. Other senses take the lead. The 
walker is guided as well by the sense of smell. 
Every plant and field and forest emits its odor 
now, swamp-pink in the meadow and tansy in the 



298 EXCURSIONS 

road ; and there is the peculiar dry scent of corn 
which has begun to show its tassels. The senses 
both of hearing and smelling are more alert. We 
hear the tinkling of rills which we never detected 
before. From time to time, high up on the sides 
of hills, you pass through a stratum of warm air. 
A blast which has come up from the sultry plains 
of noon. It tells of the day, of sunny noontide 
hours and banks, of the laborer wiping his brow 
and the bee humming amid flowers. It is an 
air in which work has been done, — which men 
have breathed. It circulates about from wood- 
side to hill-side like a dog that has lost its master, 
now that the sun is gone. The rocks retain all 
night the warmth of the sun which they have ab- 
sorbed. And so does the sand. If you dig a 
few inches into it you find a warm bed. You lie 
on your back on a rock in a pasture on the top 
of some bare hill at midnight, and speculate on 
the height of the starry canopy. The stars are 
the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass 
anything which day has to show. A companion 
with whom I was sailing one very windy but 
bright moonlight night, when the stars were few 
and faint, thought that a man could get along 
with them,, — though he was considerably reduced 
in his circumstances, — that they were a kind of 
bread and cheese that never failed. 

No wonder that there have been astrologers, 
that some have conceived that they were per- 



NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT 299 

sonally related to particular stars. Dubartas, 
as translated by Sylvester, says he '11 

"not believe that the great architect 
With all these fires the heavenly arches decked 
Only for show, and with these glistering shields, 
T" awake poor shepherds, watching in the fields/' 
He '11 "not believe that the least flower which pranks 
Our garden borders, or our common banks, 
And the least stone, that in her warming lap 
Our mother earth doth covetously wrap, 
Hath some peculiar virtue of its own, 
And that the glorious stars of heav'n have none." 

And Sir Walter Raleigh well says, "the stars 
are instruments of far greater use, than to give 
an obscure light, and for men to gaze on after 
sunset;" and he quotes Plotinus as affirming that 
they "are significant, but not efficient" ; and also 
Augustine as saying, "Deus regit inferiora cor- 
pora per superior a :" God rules the bodies below 
by those above. But best of all is this which an- 
other writer has expressed: "Sapiens adjuvabit 
opus astrorum quemadmodum agricola terra? 
naturam:" a wise man assisteth the work of the 
stars as the husbandman helpeth the nature of 
the soil. 

It does not concern men who are asleep in their 
beds, but it is very important to the traveller, 
whether the moon shines brightly or is obscured. 
It is not easy to realize the serene joy of all the 
earth, when she commences to shine unobstruct- 



300 EXCURSIONS 

edly, unless you have often been abroad alone in 
moonlight nights. She seems to be waging con- 
tinual war with the clouds in your behalf. Yet 
we fancy the clouds to be her foes also. She 
comes on magnifying her dangers by her light, 
revealing, displaying them in all their hugeness 
and blackness, then suddenly casts them be- 
hind into the light concealed, and goes her way 
triumphant through a small space of clear sky. 

In short, the moon traversing, or appearing 
to traverse, the small clouds which lie in her way, 
now obscured by them, now easily dissipating and 
shining through them, makes the drama of the 
moonlight night to all watchers and night-trav- 
ellers. Sailors speak of it as the moon eating up 
the clouds. The traveller all alone, the moon all 
alone, except for his sympathy, overcoming with 
incessant victory whole squadrons of clouds 
above the forests and lakes and hills. When 
she is obscured he so sympathizes with her that 
he could whip a dog for her relief, as Indians do. 
When she enters on a clear field of great extent 
in the heavens, and shines unobstructedly, he is 
glad. And when she has fought her way through 
all the squadron of her foes, and rides majestic in 
a clear sky unscathed, and there are no more any 
obstructions in her path, he cheerfully and con- 
fidently pursues his way, and rejoices in his heart, 
and the cricket also seems to express joy in its 
song. 



NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT 301 

How insupportable would be the days, if the 
night with its dews and darkness did not come 
to restore the drooping world. As the shades 
begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts 
are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, 
like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of 
those silent and brooding thoughts which are the 
natural prey of the intellect. 

Richter says that "The earth is every day 
overspread with the veil of night for the same 
reason as the cages of birds are darkened, viz.: 
that we may the more readily apprehend the 
higher harmonies of thought in the hush and quiet 
of darkness. Thoughts which day turns into 
smoke and mist, stand about us in the night as 
light and flames; even as the column which 
fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius, in the 
daytime appears a pillar of cloud, but by night 
a pillar of fire." 

There are nights in this climate of such serene 
and majestic beauty, so medicinal and fertilizing 
to the spirit, that methinks a sensitive nature 
would not devote them to oblivion, and perhaps 
there is no man but would be better and wiser 
for spending them out of doors, though he should 
sleep all the next day to pay for it ; should sleep 
an Endymion sleep, as the ancients expressed it, 
— nights which warrant the Grecian epithet am- 
brosial, when, as in the land of Beulah, the 
atmosphere is charged with dewy fragrance, and 



302 EXCURSIONS 

with music, and we take our repose and have our 
dreams awake, — when the moon, not secondary 
to the sun, 

"gives us his blaze again, 
Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day. 
Now through the passing cloud she seems to stoop, 
Now up the pure cerulean rides sublime." 

Diana still hunts in the New England sky. 

"In Heaven queen she is among the spheres, 
She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure. 
Eternity in her oft change she bears; 
She Beauty is; by her the fair endure. 

Time wears her not ; she doth his chariot guide ; 

Mortality below her orb is placed; 
By her the virtues of the stars down slide; 

By her is Virtue's perfect image cast." 

The Hindoos compare the moon to a saintly 
being who has reached the last stage of bodily 
existence. 

Great restorer of antiquity, great enchanter. 
In a mild night, when the harvest or hunter's 
moon shines unobstructedly, the houses in our 
village, whatever architect they may have had 
by day, acknowledge only a master. The village 
street is then as wild as the forest. New and old 
things are confounded. I know not whether I 
am sitting on the ruins of a wall, or on the ma- 
terial which is to compose a new one. Nature is 
an instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no 
crude opinions, and flattering none; she will be 



NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT 303 

neither radical nor conservative. Consider the 
moonlight, so civil, yet so savage! 

The light is more proportionate to our knowl- 
edge than that of day. It is no more dusky in 
ordinary nights, than our mind's habitual atmos- 
phere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most 
illuminated moments are. 

"In such a night let me abroad remain 
Till morning breaks, and all's confused again." 

Of what significance the light of day, if it is 
not the reflection of an inward dawn? — to what 
purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the 
morning reveals nothing to the soul ? It is merely 
garish and glaring. 

When Ossian in his address to the sun ex- 
claims, 

"Where has darkness its dwelling? 
Where is the cavernous home of the stars, 
When thou quickly followest their steps, 
Pursuing them like a hunter in the sky, — 
Thou climbing the lofty hills, 
They descending on barren mountains?" 

who does not in his thought accompany the stars 
to their "cavernous home," "descending" with 
them "on barren mountains"? 

Nevertheless, even by night the sky is blue and 
not black, for we see through the shadow of the 
earth into the distant atmosphere of day, where 
the sunbeams are revelling. 



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